IED – Istituto Europeo di Design Barcelona
Summer Course in Innovation and Future Thinking
Barcelona, Spain
Summer Course
DURATION
2 weeks
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Part time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
EARLIEST START DATE
14 Jul 2026
TUITION FEES
EUR 1,900 *
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
* enrollment fee € 500 + course fee € 1400
Key Summary
The Summer Course in Innovation and Future thinking —the Futures Lab—will help students improve their ability to detect signals of change, organize insights into understandable models, synthesize new ways of mapping possible futures, identify the potential barriers and opportunities these futures present, and design innovative products, services or ideas that satisfy emerging needs.
By learning the fundamentals of foresight and futures thinking, and how to tie these to innovation and creation, students will gain a toolset that doesn’t tell them what will happen in the future, but gives them the capability to identify and assess alternative futures presented by the world around them. Whether designing a new business, forward-looking fashion, a smartphone app, or the next decade’s car, this course provides the tools for anticipation and action.
The Summer Course in Innovation and Future Thinking is for students and professionals from a variety of fields and backgrounds with one thing in common: a healthy interest in innovation and creative thinking.
People looking for new ways to create products, services and business concepts will find the course both interesting and useful with its mix of strategic business vision and product design development.
If you want to combine creative skills with a rigorous approach to thinking, this course is a great place to start.
Methodology
This course begins by asking the fundamental question: “Why think about the future?” It will explore this through an overview of essential futuring skills—horizon scanning and trends identification and analysis—looking at weak signals, micro- and macro-trends—and how to use these to think about implications and unexpected outcomes. This will include observational analysis, searching Barcelona for indicators about the future, studying behaviors, messages, and signs that point to emergent change.
We will visit scenario development, road mapping, timelines and backcasting, and creative ideation to develop new future narratives as a way of writing stories about the future we can use strategically. We will also have Skype talks from futurists, innovators, and designers who employ these techniques in their own work.
From this basis, we will look at innovation practices and processes—traditional top-down, bottom-up, and open innovation—and how these are being used in both major companies and cutting-edge startups. By learning how to tie foresight to innovation, we will look at future-proofing new design and product development.
Lastly, we will look at prototyping using the futures we have created and build toward a final project that presents solutions to the wicked problems we’ve uncovered—creating for the next decade.
Objectives
The objective of the Futures Lab is to provide students and professionals from varied backgrounds a strong baseline understanding of foresight and how it ties to strategy, innovation, and creation. This is done not only by teaching essential data collection and modeling, but narrative development, strategic framing, prototyping, and communication.