Design Thinking and Creativity for Innovation

Learn the fundamentals of how design thinking and creativity can be used to enable innovation.

Provided by The University of Queensland.

About this course

Innovation matters to everyone, including managers in small or large organizations, start-up entrepreneurs, those in government roles, or teachers.

This course looks at how individuals and organizations use creativity and design thinking skills to identify and choose opportunities that enable innovation. Creative problem-solving skills are developed and enhanced through a range of real-world activities. An overview of design thinking tools is provided to help students understand design thinking as a problem-solving approach. Ideas developed through these processes are then applied to a customer discovery approach to understand their value in the market place.

What you’ll learn

• The nature of human creativity and innovation,
• How creativity and design thinking help business to solve complex problems,
• The process and tools of design thinking,
• Different creativity and design processes and how it can be used to generate better ideas,
• How to use a variety of tools to help validate your ideas to improve their chances for impact,
• The use of design sprints to integrate the different elements of the course into a systematic method for generating and testing new ideas,
• How to build organizations that support creative and innovative thinking.

Course Syllabus

• Week 1: What are creativity, innovation, and design 
  The core concepts of creativity, design, and innovation
• Week 2: Creativity Myths 
  Mistaken beliefs about creativity and why they’re dangerous
• Week 3: Creative people, creative organizations
  Ideas and tools to help both people and organizations work more creatively
• Week 4: Impact and purpose 
  Measuring impact and the value created through creativity
• Week 5: Design thinking for innovation
  The role of empathy in the design thinking process and the tools we can use
• Week 6: How do we learn what people want? 
  How we ensure learning fits people’s needs
• Week 7: Experiments
  Designing and executing experiments for value creation
• Week 8: The design sprint
  Principles of a design sprint and how to make it happen
• Week 9: Distributed creativity 
  How diversity and collaboration through networks support the creativity process
• Week 10: Moving from ideas to impact
  Bring the ideas presented in this course together and show how organizations can create impact from ideas