Design Thinking and Creativity for Innovation

Innovation matters to everyone, including managers in small or large organizations, start-up entrepreneurs, those in government roles, or teachers.

This course looks at how individuals and organizations use creativity and design thinking skills to identify and choose opportunities that enable innovation. Creative problem solving skills are developed and enhanced through a range of real world activities. An overview of design thinking tools is provided to help students understand design thinking as a problem solving approach. Ideas developed through these processes are then applied to a customer discovery approach to understand their value in the market place.

Week 1: What is creativity, innovation and design
The core concepts of creativity, design and innovation

Week 2: Creativity Myths
Mistaken beliefs about creativity and why they're dangerous

Week 3: Creative people, creative organizations
Ideas and tools to help both people and organisations work more creatively

Week 4: Impact and purpose
Measuring impact and the value created through creativity

Week 5: Design thinking for innovation
The role of empathy in the design thinking process and the tools we can use

Week 6: How do we learn what people want?
How we ensure learning fits people's needs

Week 7: Experiments
Designing and executing experiments for value creation

Week 8: The design sprint
Principles of a design sprint and how to make it happen

Week 9: Distributed creativity
How diversity and collaboration through networks support the creativity process

Week 10: Moving from ideas to impact
Bring the ideas presented in this course together and show how organizations can create impact from ideas