Innovation and Design Thinking Certificate Program

What if you could create radical solutions that could stimulate an emotional response? Better yet, what if you could do so rapidly?

Experimental, collaborative and holistically innovative. That’s design thinking. It’s a mindset for success. It’s for anyone who wants to see infinite possibilities and turn problems into solutions. Putting the customer front and center, design thinking offers a strategy for successful companies to be more agile and innovative. Using a proven process to drive innovation, you will work in small teams to visualize outcomes and challenge assumptions. You’ll learn a proven, repeatable, creative and collaborative problem-solving method that you can use to reframe problems and generate more rapid, empathetic and innovative products and services.

• Understand how design thinking can improve organizational and personal performance
• Embrace uncertainty and develop an experimental mindset to iterate quickly
• Create a new process and attack  problems from a completely new angle
• Convert ideas into customer value and market opportunity
• Release your group’s creative thinking and sharpen critical analysis
• Create more progressive and practical solutions for real-world problems
• Balance constraints and technical limitations with customer preferences
• Develop design thinking to foster collaboration across functions of the organization
• Learn how to use a repeatable process to drive rapid innovation

• Integrating design thinking into the fabric of your organization’s culture
• Adding design thinking tools and templates to help your work groups ideate solutions
• Developing a more collaborative and iterative style of work for groups/teams
• Understanding the drivers and inhibitors of innovation
• Learning the importance of stakeholders and interpreters 
• Leading collaborative problem-solving testing
• Learning to envision and design collaboratively with visual imaging
• Mapping stakeholders and the complex network of beneficiaries
• Understanding the social-psychological aspect of user experience
• Exploring formal methods for usability testing to form customer behavior and emotional response
• Presenting your vision and inviting buy-in through compelling storytelling
• Fostering an organizational climate for innovation

Learning Objectives

• Understand How Design Thinking Can Improve Organizational Performance
• Embrace Design Thinking to Create Your New Competitive Asset
• Learn How to Convert Ideas into Customer Value and Market Opportunity
• Sharpen Your Creative Thinking and Critical Analysis Skills
• Create More Progressive and Practical Solutions for Real-World Problems
• Balance Real-World Constraints with Technical Limitations and Consumer Preferences
• Develop New Ways to Collaborate Across All Functions of the Organization
• Learn How to Use a 10-Step, Iterative and Repeatable Process to Drive Rapid Innovation