Apple
Learn how Apple has succeeded by designing products and services that address a key customer need: ease of use.
Create Value Through Systematic Innovation
February 3, 2021
3 months, online
6-8 hours per week
Special pricing up to 20% discount is available if you enroll with your colleagues. Please send an email to group-enrollments@emeritus.org for more information.
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.
This program 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:
Mastering 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.
Begin your Design Thinking Learning Journey:
128 Video Lectures
3 Live Teaching Sessions
3 Group Projects
10 Assignments
1 Capstone Project
7 Real World Applications
Understand the critical design thinking skills needed to either improve an existing product or design a new product.
Learn to identify customer needs and draft customer needs statements as your first step towards user innovations.
Learn how to translate user needs into product specifications quantitatively, and how establishing product metrics can help to define those specifications.
Learn to apply creativity, brainstorming, and concept generation process in designing needs solutions.
Explore prototyping methods, strategies, and real-life examples where these have been applied to create a design that represents customer needs and product specifications.
Understand design of services, identify the potential for innovations within them, and learn how to apply product development frameworks to the service context.
Learn to use the modular and integral product architectures in determining the building blocks of a product.
Learn to perform financial analysis of your project idea and decide if it is backed by a strong business rationale (Worth-It).
Learn how to apply design for environment principles to a product life cycle.
Learn to select and implement a product development process (staged, spiral, and agile)that's aligned to your project needs.
Understand design of services, identify the potential for innovations within them, and learn how to apply product development frameworks to the service context.
Understand the critical design thinking skills needed to either improve an existing product or design a new product.
Learn to use the modular and integral product architectures in determining the building blocks of a product.
Learn to identify customer needs and draft customer needs statements as your first step towards user innovations.
Learn to perform financial analysis of your project idea and decide if it is backed by a strong business rationale (Worth-It).
Learn how to translate user needs into product specifications quantitatively, and how establishing product metrics can help to define those specifications.
Learn how to apply design for environment principles to a product life cycle.
Learn to apply creativity, brainstorming, and concept generation process in designing needs solutions.
Learn to select and implement a product development process (staged, spiral, and agile)that's aligned to your project needs.
Explore prototyping methods, strategies, and real-life examples where these have been applied to create a design that represents customer needs and product specifications.
Learn how Apple has succeeded by designing products and services that address a key customer need: ease of use.
Review an example of a fully comprehensive prototype and test via the complex system of Boeing’s 787-9 twin engine commercial airplane.
Examine two recent innovations Bank of America developed based on customer needs regarding savings, and review their process for developing these service innovations.
View Zipcar’s 11-step service experience cycle and how each step needed to be designed both from a customer and business perspective for this complex process to succeed.
See how Hewlett-Packard builds products on multiple platforms using modular architectures to satisfy different markets.
See how Nespresso’s two cash flows—for machines and for coffee—affect its product development considerations, and learn about financial analysis for projects via an examination of its recycling program.
Explore modular product architecture in the context of Project Ara, the modular smartphone Google is attempting to develop that would allow customers to swap out phone components as needed and replace their device less frequently.
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Renée Richardson Gosline
Senior Lecturer and Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management
Renée Richardson Gosline is a Senior Lecturer in the Management Science group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Initiative on The Digital Economy, and a Digital Fellow at Stanford’s Digitial Economy Lab. She is an expert on the intersection between behavioral science and technology, and the implications of AI for cognitive bias in human decision-making. Dr. Goslineis a 2020 honoree on the Thinkers50 Radar List of thinkers who are “putting a dent in the universe,”and has been named one of the World’s Top 40 Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. She is a leading thinkeron the science of digital brand strategy and has contributed her expertise to PBS, The BBC, The Economist, NPR, Forbes, and Psychology Today.
Dr. Gosline’s researchexamines how structure and technology (e.g., Digital Customer Experience, Status, Social Media) affect performance and choice(as featured in her Tedx talk, “The Outsourced Mind”). Her projects have examined: how cognitive style predicts preference for AI versus human input; the interaction of brand status and placebo effects in performance; how consumers determine “real” from “fake” products; the circumstances under which customers perceive value in platforms; and the effects of storytelling in social media on trust and persuasion. In order to address these issues rigorously, Gosline employs experimental methodology, both in the field and the laboratory. She is currently conducting experiments on when and why humans prefer algorithmic to human input, and how algorithmic bias may result. Gosline is also currently writing a book called “The Human Algorithm” (MIT Press), which examines how AI affects our lives, and the benefits and perils of our digitally-mediated judgments.
Dr. Gosline enjoys teaching MBA and Executive Education classes on CX (Customer Experience), Brand strategy, Nudge Strategy, and Experimentation. She has also collaborated and consulted with a variety of organizations on CX and Leadership, including Salesforce, IBM, OECD, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, TD Ameritrade, and Capgemini. Prior to academia, she was a marketing practitioner at LVMH Moet Hennessy and Leo Burnett.
Dr. Gosline serves on the advisory board of the National Kidney Foundation and the Scientific Affiliate Board of the Behavioral Economics group Ideas42. She received her Undergraduate, Master’s, and Doctorate at Harvard University.
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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 programs in the area of product development.
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Matthew Kressy
Director and Founder, MIT Integrated Design & Management (IDM); Senior Lecturer at MIT; Principal, Designturn Inc.
Matthew S. Kressy, director and founder of the MIT Integrated Design & Management (IDM) master’s degree track, is an expert in product design and development. As an entrepreneur and founder of Designturn, he has designed, invented, engineered, and manufactured products for startups, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between.
Matt believes in interdisciplinary, design-driven product development derived from deep user research, creative concept generation, and rapid prototype iteration. He is passionate about teaching this approach to the design process.
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David Robertson
Senior Lecturer at MIT
David Robertson is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he teaches Product Development and Digital Product Management. Prior to MIT, David was a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and from 2002 through 2010 was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.
David is the author of the award-winning book about LEGO’s near-bankruptcy and spectacular recovery: Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry (Crown, 2013). David has also held several executive management positions in enterprise software companies, and spent five years at McKinsey & Company in the U.S. and Sweden.
Get a verified digital certificate of completion from MIT Sloan School of Management. This program also counts towards an MIT Sloan Executive Certificate.
Download BrochureAfter successful completion of the program, your verified digital certificate will be emailed to you, at no additional cost, in the name you used when registering for the program. All certificate images are for illustrative purposes only and may be subject to change at the discretion of MIT Sloan.
Flexible payment options available.