Learn how to leverage your design expertise and practices to become an innovative leader, influence stakeholders and interact with top management.

There is no doubt that innovation is key to progress. Companies worldwide invest millions per year on the development of new products and services that will ensure their economic sustainability. However, innovation is a challenging endeavor that requires strategic thinking, customer focus, the right organizational climate, and an effective management approach.

Designers, with their specific skills, can take a major part in driving innovation. This is already successfully happening in companies like SAP, Pepsi-Co and Philips, where design professionals play a leading role in steering innovation.

Inspired by these cases, this design course is aimed at designers who would like to take a more active role in the innovative efforts of companies, and who want to go beyond executing new product/service design briefs. It suits strategic designers with an interest in acquiring a more senior position in the company or even becoming a Chief Design Officer (CDO). Or designers with ambition to better understand and develop their strategic potential, become sparring partners in crafting briefs, and influence strategic decision-making within their organizations.

By using a three-step approach for leading and managing strategic innovation projects, this course will teach you how to harness your existing design practices – such as envisioning, orchestrating, inspiring, etc. and transform them into powerful innovation drivers. You will learn how to use these practices to impact strategic decision-making, win stakeholders' support, and identify relevant KPIs. You will also learn how to adapt your design practices and design-driven way of working to a particular company. Finally, you will practice some design methods to make your impact durable over time.

The course includes a combination of short lectures by design and innovation experts, practical exercises, several live sessions and personalized feedback given by the instructors and your fellow learners. All these will help you learn which design capabilities and practices are most valued by companies, and how to use them effectively for improving a company's innovation performance. To help you gain a better understanding of innovation, you will:

• Learn how your strategic contributions can help companies create and capture value through innovation.
• Gain an in-depth understanding of the organization you are working in.
• Utilize this understanding to effectively interact with management and other stakeholders.

What you'll learn:

• A 3-step process for leading strategic design projects
• 8 strategic design practices and related tools
• A KPI-driven way of looking at companies
• A way of thinking that combines design principles and business sense

Your Learning Platform

Take a 2 minutes video tour to see how convenient and easy it is to participate in an online course of TU Delft.

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Quotes from students attending the offline master class:
 

"The instructor did a great job - she is clearly passionate about what she does, she is engaging and dynamic. Keep going and keep evolving how you facilitate these kinds of groups!''

"The external speakers were very inspiring to learn from - they were well selected."

"I valued the fact that the course goes beyond design thinking tools and looks also at capabilities and practices."

''I liked the approach of looking beyond (the design of) the artefact itself and focus on the added value it brings to both the end user and producer. Being designer it is too easy to focus on the product itself. While in the end it is all about the added value the product brings that will define a large portion of its success."