Seminar - Design Research for Product and Service Innovation

• Prework & Outline

Design Research and the Customer-driven Innovation Strategy

Course Outline

Getting the Big Picture

Design Thinking as an approach to innovation: a framework for understanding what design thinking is and how to apply it to innovation initiatives
Why innovation fails: what designers can do to assure initiatives succeed
Design Innovation as a growth strategy: facilitating strategic conversations and building alignment to define innovation strategy
Evaluating the business opportunity: an introduction to conducting Market Opportunity Assessments
Cultural trends: using cultural trends as a framework for generating and designing new offerings
Introduction to semiotics: leveraging the cultural meaning of visual design
Profiling Customers: making segmentation useful for design and bringing customers to life
Making meaning, the basics of value creation: uncovering what is most meaningful and most valuable to customers to create an innovation platform

Design’s unique role in customer-driven innovation

Mapping the design space: creating conceptual frameworks to facilitate concept generation
Driving creative breakthroughs: using insights to redefine the problem space
Design principles: translating insights into prescriptive design direction
Systems design: designing holistic approaches for the organization
Iterative research: during design research processes to evolve and refine concepts
Validation research: building confidence in design outcomes

The Design Researcher’s tool box

Introduction to research methodologies: what tools belong in your tool box, and how to select the right method for your research objectives
How to think about research data: Research as inspiration vs. useful guidance vs. prescriptive direction vs. gospel truth

Specific methods

Design Ethnography: using observational research to build empathy, bring customers to life visually, and develop models/frameworks to see opportunities and patterns
Levels of ethnographic inquiry: the differences between causal observation, structured in-context interviewing, formal ethnography, rigorous commercial ethnography and academic ethnography