Leadership Through Design Innovation (Coursera)

Today’s workplace calls for a new style of leadership to embolden and accelerate innovation. Design offers a novel way of discovering opportunities and bringing new approaches to life in ways that benefit all stakeholders. Learn how to engage with end users, effectively frame problems, identify potential solutions, and build prototypes to test assumptions and learn what works (and doesn’t). Then dive into a range of ways large and small to bring design innovation into your organization.

Course 5 of 6 in the Organizational Leadership Specialization.

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Using Design Principles to Innovate and Find Opportunities

You will learn that the first step in the design process is finding opportunities. Human-centered designers do so by immersing themselves in a particular user context to identify areas of focus for design innovation.

Graded: Finding Opportunities / Design Brief

WEEK 2

Exploring Ideas

How do we take the opportunities that we’ve uncovered and turn them into new possibilities? In this module we’ll explore ideation, sketching, and storyboarding as tools to generate and communicate ideas.

Graded: Generating Ideas / Design Brief

WEEK 3

Prototyping to Learn

It is easy to think of prototypes as “drafts” of the final design, but in this module we’ll teach you to think of prototypes a bit differently: as tools for learning. We will discuss approaches for maximizing the amount that you learn from prototypes, and iterating your way rapidly toward outstanding results.

Graded: Using Prototypes to Accelerate Learning / Design Brief

WEEK 4

Leading Design Innovation

How do you bring design innovation to your organization and sustain it over time? In this module we will learn theory and practical techniques to help you lead an organization that routinely produces innovative products, services, and systems.

Graded: Leading Design Innovation / Design Brief