MIT – Master Design Thinking

Design thinking is a powerful process of problem solving that begins with understanding unmet customer needs. From that insight emerges a process for innovation that encompasses concept development, applied creativity, prototyping, and experimentation. When design thinking approaches are applied to business, the success rate for innovation improves substantially.

What you will learn in Master Design Thinking

Learning Journey

Master Design Thinking is for teams and individuals who want to learn a proven, systematic approach to new product development. The process puts unmet customer needs at the center of the problem, and every step brings you closer to solving the problem.

Join us with your teams and peers to accelerate the learning by collaborating on business applications. This will allow for a diversity of perspectives and help you build an action plan for your organization.

Begin your Design Thinking Learning Journey:

• Learn the concepts that drive design thinking
• Submit your project ideas around user innovations
• Identify customer needs and user groups
• Translate needs into product specifications
• Create a prototype
• Build out the product architecture
• Analyze the economics of the innovation
• Choose the right development process
• Present your final ideas, get real-time feedback

Program Topics

Orientation Module: Welcome to your Online Campus

• Module 1: Design Thinking Skills
  Understand the critical design thinking skills needed to either improve an existing product or design a new product.
• Module 2: Identifying Customer Needs
  Learn to identify customer needs and draft customer needs statements as your first step towards user innovations.
• Module 3: Product Specifications
  Learn how to translate user needs into product specifications quantitatively, and how establishing product metrics can help to define those specifications.
• Module 4: Applied Creativity
  Learn to apply creativity, brainstorming, and concept generation process in designing needs solutions.
• Module 5: Prototyping
  Explore prototyping methods, strategies, and real-life examples where these have been applied to create a design that represents customer needs and product specifications.
• Module 6: Design for Services
  Understand design of services, identify the potential for innovations within them, and learn how to apply product development frameworks to the service context.
• Module 7: Product Architecture
  Learn to use modular and integral product architectures in determining the building blocks of a product.
• Module 8: Financial Analysis
  Learn to perform financial analysis of your project idea and decide if it is backed by a strong business rationale (Worth-It).
• Module 9: Design for Environment
  Learn how to apply design for environment principles to a product life cycle.
• Module 10: Product Development Processes
  Learn to select and implement a product development process (staged, spiral, and agile)that’s aligned to your project needs.

Who is Master Design Thinking For

Master Design Thinking For is for teams and individuals who want to learn a proven, systematic approach to new product development. Anyone responsible for driving innovation, growth, and the customer experience should attend, including functional and cross-functional teams.

Roles of past participants include those from creative, design, customer experience, engineering, innovation, product, R&D, strategy, and UX, such as:

• Product Manager, Marketing Manager, Growth Manager, R&D Manager, and Product Head
• Senior Designer, UX Designer, Design Engineer, Creative Manager, UX Design Consultant, Art Director
• C-Suite executives including CEO, COO, Managing Director, Founder, President, Chief Strategy Officer
• Innovation and Growth Consultants

About Faculty

STEVEN EPPINGER

General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management; Professor of Management Science and Engineering Systems; Co-Director, System Design and Management Program

Steven D. Eppinger served as deputy dean of MIT Sloan from 2004 to 2009, as faculty co-director of the Leaders for Global Operations (formerly MIT Leaders for Manufacturing) and the System Design and Management programs from 2001 to 2003, and as co-director of the Center for Innovation in Product Development from 1999 to 2001.

Steven’s research efforts are applied to improving product design and development practices. Conducted within MIT’s Center for Innovation in Product Development, his work focuses on organizing complex design processes in order to accelerate industrial practices and has been applied primarily in the automotive, electronics, aerospace, and equipment industries.

At MIT Sloan, Steven has created an interdisciplinary product development course in which graduate students from engineering, management, and industrial design programs collaborate to develop new products. He also teaches MIT’s executive courses in the area of product development.

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