Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture

Successful companies create compelling, disruptive products and services by cultivating a culture of leadership and design thinking, and by putting people at the center of their process. These firms innovate continuously by connecting with customer needs and emotions and demonstrating effective design leadership. Learn how enable this design culture at your organization to achieve buy-in for your vision and create solutions that consumers love.

This course helps individuals and teams understand and practice human-centered design. You will learn both strategic and hands-on techniques for structured exploration through prototyping. You will also learn how to enable an action-based organizational culture in which empathy is generated, trial and error is encouraged, and failure is celebrated as a source of learning—all resulting in successful innovation.

Participants in this course will:

• Learn a shared process for solving hard to define problems
• Engage in both a hands-on and analytical approach to problem solving through robust design process.
• Explore and practice the skill of empathy in understanding the needs and desires of consumers
• Learn practical, hands-on strategies for concept generation and product prototyping
• Learn how design thinking and doing can be used to provide vision and build consensus in the development of new products & services
• Acquire tools for creating a more collaborative, innovative, and less risk-averse corporate culture
• Earn a certificate of completion from the MIT Sloan School of Management upon successful completion of the course. This course may also count toward MIT Sloan Executive Certificate requirements.

Teams from the same organization that attend this course will:

• Learn how to work across functions using an integrated approach to break down siloes
• Acquire new frameworks for communicating among and across divisions
• Gain deeper understanding and credibility among peers working in different areas

We encourage you to join with colleagues or a team from your organization as this will allow you to develop a shared language. There are team discounts available for 3 or more team members attending the course together. 

Drawing on the resources of MIT’s Integrated Design & Management curriculum and its new Integrated Design Lab (ID Lab), this program combines the inspired, intuitive methods taught in the world’s best design schools with the systematic, analytical methods for which MIT is world renowned. This program is led by Matthew S. Kressy, creator and director of MIT's Integrated Design & Management (IDM).

Course content includes:

• Discussions on expression and culture
• Field exercises in observation, exploration, and user empathy
• Lectures on concept generation
• Studio exercises in persona development and story telling
• Lectures and case studies pertaining to design leadership
• Hands-on sketch modeling and rendering exercises
• Functional prototyping workshops
• Opportunities to build, test, and iterate prototypes in teams
• Concluding discussions on process and leadership
• The tools presented in this design leadership program can be applied to any range of human-centered innovation problems and opportunities including products, services and social/societal challenges.

By applying a human-centered approach to design leadership, you’ll be able to conceive radically innovative solutions to multifaceted problems, create visions that get buy-ins from senior management and colleagues, avoid hazards, and create solutions that people love both emotionally and intellectually.