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.

• The nature of human creativity and innovation,
• How creativity and design thinking help business to solve complex problems,
• The process and tools of design thinking,
• Different creativity and design processes and how it can be used to generate better ideas,
• How to use a variety of tools to help validate your ideas to improve their chances for impact,
• The use of design sprints to integrate the different elements of the course into a systematic method for generating and testing new ideas,
• How to build organizations that support creative and innovative thinking.

• English writing/reading proficiency (required)
• General knowledge of business processes (recommended)