Mastering Innovation and Design Thinking Training Course

Why select this training course?

Innovation and design thinking are core concepts used in the administration of an organization. Innovation introduces new ideas and concepts into the running of an organization. At the same time, design thinking is an iterative process that focuses on understanding the participant, redefining business challenges, and challenging assumptions. Design thinking helps reframe and arrive at the correct solutions and mindsets for solving defined or ill-defined problems.

What are the approaches to innovation?

The standard approaches to innovation include the following:

• Capabilities: This involves the resources and abilities a company has for managing and creating innovations like financial capital, knowledge, and skills
• Structures: The organizational processes and structure that allow the practical use of capacities
• Strategy: This includes the plan of the organization for attaining long-term success
• Culture: This is why things are implemented in an organization, the organization’s values, ways of working

What are the stages of design thinking?

The design thinking process involves various stages, and each stage comprises procedures that must be implemented to achieve a given objective. The five stages of design thinking include:

• Empathise: This involves researching the needs and desires of the user.
• Define: The second stage of design thinking includes gathering the data gotten from the user and evaluating them to determine the core issues that have been identified
• Ideate: This involves generating ideas by challenging established assumptions and concepts to create new ideas
• Prototype: This is the experimental phase of the process and involves creating solutions to each identified problem
• Test: This involves rigorously evaluating the prototypes

The Rcademy Mastering Innovation and Design Thinking Training Course will equip attendees with the fundamentals of innovation and design thinking and how to impact various areas of an organization using design thinking models. The course contents are geared towards helping participants understand the basics of mastering innovation and design thinking and how to deploy them in business administration. The course also covers the stages of ideation, prototyping, and the various methods involved in the innovative process.

Who Should Attend?

The Mastering Innovation and Design Thinking Training Course by Rcademy is designed for professionals within the corporate and management industry and every other person looking to enhance their interests in innovation and design thinking. The following individuals should attend this course:

• Chief innovation officers: responsible for developing the firm’s mission and vision goals, communicating the plans to relevant stakeholders, and creating new ideas
• Design thinking professionals: charged with providing companies with a deeper understanding of the target clients
• Business owners/managers: tasked with leading and monitoring the operations of their company and implementing viable business strategies for productivity
• Heads of departments: responsible for the effective running of a department unit
• Growth managers: charged with product development, marketing customer acquisition, and retention
• Entrepreneurs: tasked with planning and overseeing the daily operations of a business, creating new ideas, and managing workplace conflicts
• Project Managers: responsible for the day-to-day management of a company’s projects 
• HR officers: charged with supervising all aspects of an employment process, training and orienting new staff members
• Stakeholders: responsible for offering guidance and supervising the administration of the company
• Directors: responsible for supervising a company’s operations, investments, ventures, and financial performances
• Business analysts: charged with conducting market analysis, evaluating the profitability of a business and its product lines
• Senior designers: tasked with managing and overseeing project designs for a project
• Marketing managers: responsible for creating and implementing strategic marketing plans for a company to attract new customers and retain existing clients
• Every other person interested in learning about innovation and design thinking

What are the course objectives?

The Rcademy Mastering Innovation and Design Thinking Training Course are produced to help attendees achieve the following outcomes:

• Understand the basics of innovation and design thinking and how to develop creative solutions to complex challenges
• Recognize new techniques and approaches to problems faced by an organization
• Learn how to question preconceived notions and assumptions holding back the prospects of a company
• Gain clarity on various challenges faced by customers and how to address them
• Learn about the innovative thinking processes and tools and how to integrate them into the administration of a company
• Develop proven strategies like story-mapping and brainstorming used in addressing complex challenges
• Learn about the ideation process
• Learn how to discover design problems and build empathy

How will this course be presented?

This course is participant-oriented and is specially designed to meet participants’ expectations and enhance their knowledge and skills. Various renowned practical approaches and techniques that will ensure constant and active learning by the participants will be used to deliver the course. Professionals who have garnered years of experience and practice will teach the course within the field. The course modules are curated from in-depth and extensive research on the subject matter.

The Rcademy Mastering Innovation and Design Thinking Training Course include practical and theoretical learning by providing participants with slides on the concept, case studies, lecture notes, and real-life scenarios. Attendees will also be able to partake in quizzes, presentations, seminar workshops, and constant feedback on the lessons learned to confirm their optimal satisfaction.

What are the topics covered in this course?

Module 1: Introduction to Design Thinking

• Overview and definition of terms
• A brief history of design thinking
• The five stages of design thinking
• Solving problems with design thinking
• Design thinking for each member of the organization
• Benefits of design thinking
• The design thinking framework

Module 2: Introduction to Innovation

• Definition of terms
• The benefits of innovation
• The innovation processes
• Problem-solving skills
• Brainstorming techniques and their value in innovative thinking
• Ideation using convergent and divergent thinking
• Mastering innovation
• Innovation vs design thinking
• Motivation and imagination

Module 3: Building Empathy

• Definition of empathy
• Techniques for building empathy
• Empathy for design thinking
• The Relevance of Empathy in design thinking
• Building empathy with user groups
• Conducting user interviews
• Best techniques to obtain results from ethnographic research
• Building empathy for the target groups

Module 4: Ideation

• Defining ideation
• The SCAMPER ideation technique
• Analogies method
• The value of ideation in design thinking
• Techniques of brainstorming
• Designing an ideation plan
• Sketching as an ideation method
• Employing the worst possible idea method
• Overcoming Barriers to Ideation

Module 5: Building Innovative Skills

• Types of innovative skills
• The innovative toolkit
• Skills that inspire skills
• Drawing inspiration
• Overcoming the fear of failure

Module 6: Framing Design Problems

• Mapping Stakeholders in a design project
• Methods with define
• The define phase
• Overview of personas
• Steps involved in creating engaging personas
• Affinity diagrams
• Empathy maps and how to use them
• Developing the point of view problem statement

Module 7: Prototyping

• Definition of prototyping
• The prototyping processes
• Fidelity prototyping and best practices
• The relevance of prototyping in design thinking
• Insights from prototyping
• Ensuring the viability and feasibility of the prototype of the actual product
• Pitfalls in prototyping

Module 8: The Value of Design Thinking in Driving Innovation

• Using design thinking to drive innovation
• Leadership as enablement
• Curating and developing design thinking
• Navigating the executions of design thinking
• Application areas

Module 9: Designing Solutions

• Introduction to the design phase
• Feedback
• Types of evaluative research
• Usability tests
• Challenges in usability testing
• Conducting heuristic evaluation
• Testing prototypes for learning and feedback

Module 10: Building an Experimentation Mindset

• Mixing ideas into complex innovation concepts
• Guide prototyping by creating crucial questions linked to the concept’s feasibility and viability
• Critiquing and strengthening concepts
• Evaluation tools
• Stakeholder analysis

Module 11: Assessing the Opportunity

• Harnessing inspiration
• Applying learnings to current design problems
• Building a culture of experimentation and safety
• The six fundamentals of a real-win-worth framework
• Establishing benchmarks and frameworks