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Lead Instructor(s)
Date(s)
Jul 17 - 19, 2023
Registration Deadline
Location
On Campus
Course Length
3 Days
Course Fee
$3,200
CEUs
2.0 CEUs
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Strengthen your leadership capabilities with powerful new approaches for conceiving radically innovative solutions, creating vision that gains buy-in, and developing solutions that people love, emotionally and intellectually. Through highly interactive lectures and small group exercises, you’ll master a proven 10-Step Design Process and acquire the strategies and hands-on experience you need to pioneer innovation and design-thinking in your workplace.

This course may be taken individually or as part of the Professional Certificate Program in Innovation and Technology.

Course Overview

As technical leaders progress in their careers, they are expected to communicate, influence, and innovate across cross-functional teams. This is as true of start-ups as it is of large matrixed organizations. However, the skills that have made these leaders successful thus far are different than the ones they need to thrive in the future. 

This course will equip you with tools, case studies, mental models, and practical methodologies you can immediately put into practice that will propel your journey and ensure your success at the next stage of your career. 

Using a 10-Step Design Process and a 3-Step Vision Creation and Communication Process, you’ll experience the design process firsthand in this interactive class that will expand your thinking, increase your confidence, and help you and your teams create more powerful solutions. Led by innovation experts, you’ll learn how to create materials that align technical and non-technical audiences and understand the vital importance of the psychology behind how people interact with technology. You will also discover how to manage creativity and assess the effectiveness of your solutions.

By the end of the three days, you’ll be better equipped to conceive of radically innovative solutions, deeply understand who your real stakeholders are and what they care about, create vision that gains buy-in from senior management and colleagues, avoid hazards, and create solutions that people love, both emotionally and intellectually.

This course was previously titled Mastering Innovation & Design-Thinking.

Course Pairing

Successful innovation requires the ability to employ design-thinking, as well as the skills to lead effectively in this context. To enhance your learning, this course is designed to be paired with the MIT Professional Education course Engineering Leadership For Emerging Leaders.

COVID-19 Updates: We fully expect to resume on-campus Short Programs courses during the Summer of 2022. Please read more here.

Learning Outcomes
  • Understand and apply a 10-Step Design Process
  • Distinguish between incremental innovation and radical innovation when creating new solutions
  • Explore case-studies to better understand how to communicate, inspire, and achieve backing for innovative solutions in multiple organizations
  • Research and understand the complex network of stakeholders involved in any project
  • Rapidly create and refine a vision for any product or service using a 3-phase approach to align technical and non-technical audiences
  • Understand and leverage the psychology behind human-machine interface
  • Effectively understand if your end-users will be delighted by your product or service

Links & Resources

Video/Audio:

News/Audio:

Other resources

Who Should Attend

This course is targeted for technical professionals who depend on cross-functional influence to successfully deliver solutions to organizational problems. Some job titles include: 

  • Design or research engineers who need a methodology for creating new development pipelines
  • Project engineers or managers who want frameworks for leading highly effective innovation efforts
  • Product engineers looking to develop new solutions for consumer challenges
  • Applied scientists who want to translate data into actionable and innovative insights
  • Research scientists who need practical frameworks for communicating and acquiring support for their work  

Professionals in other areas who believe that design-thinking would be valuable in their careers are also welcome to attend.  

Requirements

Laptops or tablets with the ability to create PowerPoint or Keynote presentations are required for this course. 

Testimonials

"Never took such a dynamic course like this."
ASSOCIATE MECHANICAL ENGINEER, SMITH ELECTRIC VEHICLES
"This class is very dynamic. It's easy to stay connected to the class, even after almost 10 hours of class. The teacher provides a lot of examples from his own experience and demonstrates high knowledge about the topic. In addition, they [are] successful leaders and an inspiration."
STUDENT, UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO
"Everything exceeded my expectations. The organization was brilliant and the content was very deep ..."
MARKET DEVELOPER, CENTER FOR UNDERLEVERANDØRER
"The instructors provided us relevant practical assignments while they were teaching the theory. This helped me a lot to learn completely while in the class."
TECHNICAL LEAD, COMPUTER SCIENCE CORPORATION
Program Outline

Class runs from 9:00 am - 5:00 pm each day.

Day One 

  • The 10-Step Design Process: Overview of the design process and group exercises
  • Small Group Design Exercise: Interactive design exercise, evaluation of design
  • Innovation: Understanding the origin of innovation, evaluating design principles
  • Case Study 1: Solve your problem by solving someone else’s problem
  • 3-Phase Vision Creation: Learning to articulate design in phases, K-Scripts, State Tables
  • Stakeholder Analysis: Understanding how to map the complex network of beneficiaries

 Day Two 

  • Decision-evaluation and critique: Evaluation exercise, critique techniques
  • Psychology of human-computer interaction
  • Case Study 2: Constraints fuel innovation
  • Small Group Design Exercise 2: Empathetic design experience
  • Leadership Skills: overview of skills required to create an innovative culture
  • Case Study 3: Obsolete yourself before someone else obsoletes you
  • Usability Testing Techniques: Organizing and interpreting results
  • Presentation Techniques: Advocating for innovation and design

 Day Three 

  • Small-Group Project: Redesigning something real
  • Presentation of Analysis and Design
  • Design Philosophy and Closing Remarks
BROCHURE
Download the Course Brochure
Design-Thinking and Innovation for Technical Leaders - Brochure Image
Content

The type of content you will learn in this course, whether it's a foundational understanding of the subject, the hottest trends and developments in the field, or suggested practical applications for industry.

Fundamentals: Core concepts, understandings, and tools - 50%|Industry Applications: Linking theory and real-world - 50%
50|50
Delivery Methods

How the course is taught, from traditional classroom lectures and riveting discussions to group projects to engaging and interactive simulations and exercises with your peers.

Lecture: Delivery of material in a lecture format - 50%|Discussion or Groupwork: Participatory learning - 50%
50|50
Levels

What level of expertise and familiarity the material in this course assumes you have. The greater the amount of introductory material taught in the course, the less you will need to be familiar with when you attend.

Introductory: Appropriate for a general audience - 95%|Specialized: Assumes experience in practice area or field - 5%
95|5