Design Thinking for Business Impact

Design Thinking for Business Impact is ideal for individuals or teams who are new to design thinking, looking for a refresher course, or want to rapidly get to grips with design thinking.

Date: TBC

Course Outline

Design Thinking for Business Impact is ideal for individuals or teams who are new to design thinking; looking for a refresher course; or want to rapidly get to grips with design thinking in practice.

This is a three-day, hands-on course that will teach you the fundamentals of design thinking through a collaborative, human-centred approach. Learn how to reframe business problems, be truly customer-focused, and create impactful solutions in your own organisation.

The course provides an overview of the design thinking process from conception to presentation, and gives you the opportunity to work on a real project from start to finish - either one provided by your employer, or one provided by us.

You might be:

  • Growing or refining your product development offering
  • Trying to develop or improve services
  • Seeking ways to pivot your business and create new opportunities
  • Trying to make progress on a difficult problem
  • Looking to improve customer experience and relationships
  • Managing teams or businesses that are already using design thinking

Design Thinking for Business Impact involves three days of intensive teaching, practice and reflection – learning by doing; and from each other. Course intakes are limited, with two expert coaches per course, so you'll get highly personalised support and learning.

Our commitment is that you will be able to implement and action design thinking in your work straight away.

This course has been co-developed by Waikato Management School and Priority One to bring the best of global practice to meet the professional development needs of industry and professionals.

What you will learn

  1. Understand the needs, drivers and triggers of people who are important to your organisation, eg. staff, customers, users, and stakeholders.
  2. Get to the heart of problems or opportunities in ways that are actionable.
  3. Unlock creativity and ideas to create new solutions.
  4. Get participation and buy-in to new initiatives.
  5. Develop, test and refine concepts in ways that reduce risk and increase speed of change.

Design thinking for business

design thinking for business yt tb

Topics covered

  1. Introduction: Forming effective design thinking project teams.
  2. Framing: Creating a design challenge.
  3. Empathy: How to ask great questions, interview, observe and listen for insight
  4. Define: How to synthesise findings and theme customer needs
  5. Ideation: How to generate better ideas and stretch your thinking.
  6. Prototyping: Simple prototyping methods, designed for rapid, powerful feedback
  7. Testing: Generating, collating and incorporating feedback to adapt prototypes
  8. Storytelling: How to frame a story for buy in, support and success

Audience:

  • Managers and professionals
  • Senior management
  • Directors
  • C-suite level

Fees and event details

Fees

$TBC (inc. GST)

Event details

When: Three-day, hands-on course - Date TBC

Time: 9am to 5pm each day

Where: University of Waikato - Hamilton and Tauranga campuses

Please note that this course is delivered on campus (face-to-face) and is not available as an online option. Participants must be able to attend in person. Lunch will be provided each day.

Registrations

When we have a course date, we will include a registration link. 
Note: For University of Waikato staff, you will need to pay via journal transfer. Please contact Helen Nicol in the Executive Education team to reserve your spot and collect the account code.

Enquiries

Don't see a date for a course you want?