Today’s workplace calls for a new style of leadership to embolden and accelerate innovation. Design offers a novel way to discover market opportunities, experiment to validate concepts and mitigate risk, and deliver value to all stakeholders. This course offers hands-on experience applying human-centered design process to real-world challenges, and requires you to explore the world around you. Learn how to engage with end users, effectively frame problems, identify potential solutions, and build prototypes to test assumptions and learn what works (and doesn’t). Then dive into a range of ways large and small to bring design innovation into your organization.
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Leading Design Innovation
How do you bring design innovation to your organization and sustain it over time? In this module we will learn theory and practical techniques to help you lead an organization that routinely produces innovative products, services, and systems.
Associate Professor, Co-director of the Research Cluster at the Segal Design Institute McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science (Segal Design Institute), School of Communication, Kellogg School of Management (by courtesy), School of Education and Social Policy (by courtesy)
Pam Daniels
Clinical Assistant Professor, Design Innovator in Residence McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Segal Design Institute)
Ed Colgate
Allen and Johnnie Breed University Design Professor, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Director of the Engineering Design and Innovation Masters Program at the Segal Design Institute McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
Greg Holderfield
Pentair - D. Eugene and Bonnie L. Nugent Clinical Associate Professor of Design, Director of the Segal Design Institute, Co-Director of the MMM Program McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science (Segal Design Institute)
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Hi, I'm Liz Gerber.
In the previous modules, you learned the process that drives design innovation.
Now when you want to bring innovation to your organization and
sustain it over time, where do you begin?
In this module, I will share theory, case studies, and
practical techniques to help you lead an organization that routinely produces
innovative product, service, and systems.
Let's start by discussing the essential attitudes that a design
focused organization needs to foster to achieve quality results.
Working together.
Important problems that actually worth solving are often located in complex
systems which involve many stakeholders.
To design sustainable, useful and meaningful solutions,
it's not enough to depend on a single expert with a single perspective.
Innovation occurs when people with diverse backgrounds work together.
Only then can you quickly get to novel insights and solutions.
The next attitude to consider is building to learn, not to impress.
Learning and innovation are tightly linked.
We learn more when we focus on what is possible,
rather than be preoccupied with appearing to have all of the answers.
The drive to be right and striving to impress others causes people to
only consider what they already know, rather than explore what they don't know.
By contrast,
people who have a growth mindset are constantly seeking learning opportunities.
They've driven by the belief that you can always learn more and
improve through practice.
Failed attempts are not a sign of inadequacy and risks are happily taken.
The next attitude considered is taking many paths.
This is based on research that when we commit to a single idea early,
we are less likely to learn.
And the further along you go down a single path, the costlier the mistakes become.
Exploring good and bad ideas early in the process exposes important gaps in
knowledge and enables organizations to learn whether ideas have promise.
Lastly, let's discuss embracing change.
Research finds that innovators actively desire to change the status quo and
regularly take risks to make the change happen.
Skype cofounder, Niklas Zennstrom, says that he wants to be disruptive, but
in the cause of making the world a better place.
Innovators avoid the human tendency to prefer the existing state of affairs.
My own research found that it's easier to take risk and
learn from mistakes when embracing design innovation's mission of embracing change.
To look at how these attitudes translate into practice, let's talk a look at
Iliana Moore's decision to create a new patient portal to improve the access to
medical records online for her patients at the Erie Family Health Center.
First, she put together a team that included a medical doctor,
a social worker, a patient, a caregiver, an interaction designer,
and a technician who maintained the portal and records.
Together, they built many rough, inexpensive mockups out of paper and
cardboard to understand the necessary size of the online medical record interface,
the placement of the monitor in the waiting room, and the sequence for
data entry, and so on.
The team created, at least, three different prototype at each
stage of the design process, so that they would not fixate on a single solution, but
rather keep in a state of exploration.
By having this attitude, they quickly learned about the language barriers and
the difficulty of navigating the portal on a small handheld device.
By focusing on direct, actionable feedback, elicited from the prototypes,
to enable learning rather than the avoidance of prototypes that didn't work,
they made quicker progress.
She knew that their unflinching willingness to take risks and
learning from mistakes was the only way to get there.
While these attitudes are easy to describe, they can be hard to foster in
a work environment where people are busy with their current work and
resistant to change.
Plus, people often perceive learning from experimentation as expensive and
threatening to their job security.
Great leaders overcome these challenges by creating an environment which makes it
easier for people to take risks by providing inspiration and
opportunities to learn from innovation.
But how do they do this?
As you've learned in previous modules, leaders lead by example.
You could be a role model to your employees, and
use the design innovation approach you've just learned in your own organization.
Your challenge as a leader of design innovation is as follows.
How might you design your organization to be more innovative?
In the following videos, I will talk about three areas of your organization which you
may focus your efforts, communication, building your team, and physical space.
In the final video, I will talk about return on investment.