Design Practice in Business: Spark Innovation like a Designer (edX)

Are you a design practitioner eager to become more strategic? Are you a business professional who wants to become more innovative? In this course, made by the world’s first strategic design school, you’ll follow the lead of big successful companies who already create new business opportunities and spark innovation by practicing design.
This course will introduce you to a hands-on design approach for finding new business opportunities. You will experience first-hand how design can be of value for your organisation. You’ll be challenged to create your own concepts that generate new business opportunities.
This course is produced by the same team that created the Strategic Product Design master programme at TU Delft, one of the oldest and most established programmes of strategic design in the world. Moreover, industry experts will help bridging design practice and business theory in a way that is unique in the present educational landscape.
What you'll learn:

• How practicing design at a strategic level makes your organisation more innovative
• Ways designers discover new business opportunities
• Translating business insights into valuable concepts
• Making a concept a business success
• The pros and cons, the do’s and don’ts of design practice for business

Syllabus

Week 1: You will learn why design practices are valuable to businesses and be familiarized with innovation KPIs used by different businesses. The assignment of this week will include creating a personalized story in which you will describe how design is relevant for business and how this relates to the different design practices.
Week 2: You will learn to analyze the current state of a company, its businesses context and customer experience. For this, you will create your own customer journey map and stakeholder map. From this you will learn to discover new creative, promising opportunities.
Week 3: You will transform the analysis results and business opportunity discovered in the previous week into a viable concept. In this week you will also reflect on the impact these processes have on the organization.
Week 4: You will dive into product marketing aspects – Why some new products succeed while others fail miserably. You’ll assess the importance of a proficient launch and branding strategy for new products and reflect on the relationships among innovation, branding and design. You will build a distinctive and convincing positioning statement for the concept that you developed in week 3.
Week 5: You will reflect on the different design practices learned in the past weeks and see which methods can bring most value to your business.