Master Class Business Design Thinking

You will start with learning a hands-on approach to translate strategy into concrete projects. You will learn to develop and carry out reliable, customer-focused research. This will help you discover your customers’ needs (and, in other words, your triggers for innovation). Next to observation skills, we will also provide you with techniques for idea generation and co-creation in order to gain new insights.

The module consists of four elements:

• strategy determination: Who are you as a company? Who are your customers and why do you want to innovate?
• planning and carrying out research: Along with your users, you will uncover their real needs by means of qualitative user research (observation, customer journey mapping etc.).
• analyzing research results: What meaningful insights can you gain from your research and what valuable solutions could these insights offer to your customers?
• the design brief: a synthesis of all previous steps, turned into clear-cut instructions.

After this research phase you will have time to apply the insights gained from your fictional case study to your own organization. This will help you find out the direction your organization should take and what your users actually need. You will be capable of drawing up a clear brief or project, ready to start your own journey.

In this module you will get to work with simple but powerful prototyping techniques for complex environments. You will learn how to convert the design brief into solid prototypes. Simultaneously a business model will develop, leading to a first draft of a marketable concept.

Finally, we will show you how design thinking can change your organization and its culture, step by step and bottom-up (i.e. through the projects) and how it may have a lasting impact on your own way of thinking as well.

The module consists of three steps:

• idea generation: the generation (using co-creation) of as many new, innovative ideas as possible, based on the design brief.
• prototyping and testing: the iterative process of building (together), testing and learning of increasingly reliable prototypes of products, services or systems.
• real life implementation: translation into a business model and a first implementation plan for the company that offers this solution.

At the end of this program you will be able to:

• discover new, customer-focused and competitive opportunities regarding systems, processes, products and services;
• develop your creative talents and use them to solve problems and to discover or create opportunities; this will help you boost your company productivity;
• change your way of thinking: you will learn to think like your customers and to create synergies between ‘what the customer wants’ and ‘where your company want to go to’;
• improve the success rate and to minimize failures, as you will be thoroughly familiar with your customers’ needs and values;
• embrace complexity and use it according to the needs of your organization and customers;
• learn how to inspire and manage cross-disciplinary collaboration; by involving all levels, new partnerships will emerge, strengthening your organization;
• apply new insights and tools to improve the flow of knowledge and ideation processes;

Up till three months after the program, you can consult with our experts should you need any advice.