Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture

Successful companies create compelling, disruptive products and services by cultivating a culture of design thinking—and by putting people at the center of their process. These firms innovate continuously by connecting with customer needs and emotions and demonstrating effective design leadership. Learn how enable this design culture at your organization to achieve buy-in for your vision and create solutions that consumers love.

This new program helps individuals and teams understand and practice human-centered design. You will learn both strategic and hands-on techniques for structured exploration through prototyping. You will also learn how to enable an action-based organizational culture in which empathy is generated, trial and error is encouraged, and failure is celebrated as a source of learning—all resulting in successful innovation.

Drawing on the resources of MIT’s Integrated Design & Management curriculum and its new Integrated Design Lab (ID Lab), this program combines the inspired, intuitive methods taught in the world’s best design schools with the systematic, analytical methods for which MIT is world renowned. This program is led by Matthew S. Kressy, creator and Director of Integrated Design & Management (IDM).

Course content includes:

• Discussions on expression and culture
• Field exercises in observation, exploration, and user empathy
• Lectures on concept generation
• Studio exercises in persona development and story telling
• Lectures and case studies pertaining to design leadership
• Hands-on sketch modeling and rendering exercises
• Functional prototyping workshops
• Opportunities to build, test, and iterate prototypes in teams
• Concluding discussions on process and leadership

The tools presented in the program can be applied to any range of human-centered innovation problems and opportunities including products, services and social/societal challenges.

By applying a human-design centered approach to leadership, you’ll be able to conceive of radically innovative solutions to multifaceted problems, create a vision that gets buy-in from senior management and colleagues, avoid hazards, and create solutions that people love both emotionally and intellectually.