Emeritus Institute of Management

Online Certificate in Mastering Design Thinking

Who Should Attend

This program is for teams and individuals who want to learn a proven, systematic approach to new product development. Anyone responsible for driving innovation, growth, and the customer experience should attend, including functional and cross-functional teams.

Roles of past participants include those from creative, design, customer experience, engineering, innovation, product, R&D, strategy, and UX, such as:

• Product Manager, Marketing Manager, Growth Manager, R&D Manager, and Product Head
• Senior Designer, UX Designer, Design Engineer, Creative Manager, UX Design Consultant, Art Director
• C-Suite executives including CEO, COO, Managing Director, Founder, President, Chief Strategy Officer
• Innovation and Growth Consultants

Learning Journey

Mastering Design Thinking is for teams and individuals who want to learn a proven, systematic approach to new product development. The process puts unmet customer needs at the center of the problem, and every step brings you closer to solving the problem.

Join us with your teams and peers to accelerate learning by collaborating on business applications. This will allow for a diversity of perspectives and help you build an action plan for your organization.

Begin your Design Thinking Learning Journey:

• Learn the concepts that drive design thinking
• Submit your project ideas around user innovations
• Identify customer needs and user groups
• Translate needs into product specifications
• Create a prototype
• Build out the product architecture
• Analyze the economics of the innovation
• Choose the right development process
• Present your final ideas, get real-time feedback

Program Topics

Orientation Module: Welcome to your Online Campus

Module 1: Design Thinking Skills

Understand the critical design thinking skills needed to either improve an existing product or design a new product.

Module 2: Identifying Customer Needs

Learn to identify customer needs and draft customer needs statements as your first step toward user innovations.

Module 3: Product Specifications

Learn how to translate user needs into product specifications quantitatively, and how establishing product metrics can help to define those specifications.

Module 4: Applied Creativity

Learn to apply creativity, brainstorming, and concept generation process in designing needs solutions.

Module 5: Prototyping

Explore prototyping methods, strategies, and real-life examples where these have been applied to create a design that represents customer needs and product specifications.

Module 6: Design for Services

Understand the design of services, identify the potential for innovations within them, and learn how to apply product development frameworks to the service context.

Module 7: Product Architecture

Learn to use modular and integral product architectures in determining the building blocks of a product.

Module 8: Financial Analysis

Learn to perform a financial analysis of your project idea and decide if it is backed by a strong business rationale (Worth-It).

Module 9: Design for Environment

Learn how to apply design for environment principles to a product life cycle.

Module 10: Product Development Processes

Learn to select and implement a product development process (staged, spiral, and agile) that's aligned with your project needs.

Case Studies

Apple

Learn how Apple has succeeded by designing products and services that address a key customer need: ease of use.

Boeing

Review an example of a fully comprehensive prototype and test via the complex system of Boeing’s 787-9 twin-engine commercial airplane.

Bank of America

Examine two recent innovations Bank of America developed based on customer needs regarding savings, and review their process for developing these service innovations.

Zipcar

View Zipcar’s 11-step service experience cycle and how each step needed to be designed both from a customer and business perspective for this complex process to succeed.

Hewlett-Packard

See how Hewlett-Packard builds products on multiple platforms using modular architectures to satisfy different markets.

Nespresso

See how Nespresso’s two cash flows—for machines and for coffee—affect its product development considerations, and learn about financial analysis for projects via an examination of its recycling program.

Google

Explore modular product architecture in the context of Project Ara, the modular smartphone Google is attempting to develop that would allow customers to swap out phone components as needed and replace their devices less frequently.