In-person: Design Thinking for Innovative Problem Solving

New products, services and business models are only as successful as their ability to solve deep, painful problems for end users. Lead a mindset shift in your organization and embrace creativity as a tool; a step-by-step process to find and execute solutions that improve profits, efficiency, and customer satisfaction; and keep your business ahead of the innovation curve. This course, when taken after completion of your Specialization in Design Thinking and Innovation will help sharpen your design thinking expertise so that you can train your team and integrate design thinking into all aspects of your business.

Design Thinking Part I - Insights to Inspiration

Faced with growth or development challenges, most managers dive headfirst into the search for inventive solutions. But creative roundtables, brainstorming sessions, and other traditional attempts to conjure inspired ideas typically fall short. Discover your creative potential. Learn a proven, structured approach to invention — a truly systematic process for ideation — to spark workplace creativity. In this five-week, project-based course taught by Darden Professor Jeanne Liedtka, internationally recognized leader in design thinking, you'll lay the groundwork for great ideas, strengthen your innovation mindset and learn research techniques that jumpstart your team's potential for new and inspired ideas.

Design Thinking Part II - Ideas to Action 

Now that you’ve discovered real and unmet needs in the market, your work as an innovator begins. Find your breakthrough in this conclusion to the design thinking process. In Design Thinking Part II: Ideas to Action, you'll develop the ideas you sourced in Part I* and transform them into powerful actions. To capitalize on the promise of design thinking, you must do the exciting work that follows inspiration: developing ideas quickly and broadly, testing them for viability in relevant contexts, and bringing them to market. 

Discovery Tools

In order to invent, we need to first discover. In this course, you’ll learn about and practice five human-centered tools that help you learn how to discover opportunities that have always been there, but been overlooked. Great products and services depend on connecting with real humans, where it really counts. Join us in Discovery Tools to learn how to connect with those in your world. Taught by practitioners for practitioners, this five-week course offers real-life examples to inspire your thinking and application of design principles.

Creating the Innovative Workplace

Darden’s world-renowned faculty members in entrepreneurship and innovation have combined their skills in this course to help you build a workplace culture that invites creativity. Learn how to manage teams, negotiate conflict, build effective networks and strategically plan for innovation. Drawing on the full range of Darden's cutting-edge research and hands-on expertise, you'll explore a variety of timely, relevant factors to unleash your workplace creativity, foster innovation and act as a catalyst for new endeavors within your organization.

Coursera: Design Thinking for Innovation

Today innovation is everyone's business. Whether you are a manager in a global corporation, an entrepreneur starting up, in a government role, or a teacher in an elementary school, everyone is expected to get lean – to do better with less. And that is why we all need design thinking. At every level in every kind of organization, design thinking provides the tools you need to become an innovative thinker and uncover creative opportunities that are there – you're just not seeing them yet.

In this course, we provide an overview of design thinking and work with a model containing four key questions and several tools to help you understand design thinking as a problem solving approach. We also look at several stories from different organizations that used design thinking to uncover compelling solutions.