Leading Innovation Course: Design and System Thinking

Business strategy. Plan and secure success.

Many of us have a good understanding of innovation as a concept, but less of us understand how to fully realise its value. When implemented properly, and coupled with robust system thinking skills, sustainable and responsible innovation can become a reality. This course empowers leaders to better understand the stakeholder and system landscape of their organisation and arms them with the methods and tools to create sustainable and responsible innovation.

Strategic design is a way of understanding your operating environment and the system in which it lives, to redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test. It empowers leaders and organisations to validate at every stage of the process, and create lasting value for your business, your customers, and society at large. 

Truly responsible innovation looks beyond the immediate opportunity and takes a broader and longer-term view of the system in which the innovation may live. This is the power of system thinking. System thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts.

This course will cover a range of current and emerging methodologies to unlock innovation capability within your organisation with a focus on strategic design, system thinking, and second order thinking, as well as the practical application of these skills. This learning is supported by practical exercises that will be contextual for you as leaders.

Aims

This course will teach you the principles of strategic design and system thinking, how they can be leveraged to innovate responsibly and sustainably, solve problems creatively, and execute them viably.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• understand strategic design principles for creative problem-solving
• understand organisational and market complexity through system thinking
• utilise responsible innovation framework and methods
• lead responsible innovations to improve long-term outcomes
• utilise system thinking tools when leading innovation 
• map the path to change using gap analysis
• develop practical applications with innovation principles and second order thinking
• build a sustainable innovation strategy.

Content

Leading responsible innovation

• The role of leadership in innovation
• Understanding responsible innovation 
• Adopting a system thinking approach to leading innovation 
• Exploring risks and impacts 
• Developing mitigation strategies 
• The power of design thinking in innovation practice
• Deductive, inductive, and iterative thinking
• Analytical thinking vs system thinking
• The mindset of a responsible thinker

Strategic design principles

• Establishing the practice of design as a management capability to drive systematic innovation and business model design 
• Human-centred inspiration
• System thinking principles and methods
• Second order thinking
• Innovation’s role in creating stakeholder (as well as shareholder) value
• Continuous improvement and innovation
• Impact analysis
• Theory of change

Practical applications

• The role of leadership in innovation
• Strategic design in the workplace
• Responsible Innovation in the workplace
• Emerging frameworks

Intended audience

This course is intended for senior leadership in business, government, or creative industries who are seeking to innovate with design solutions to better meet the needs of customers and society, whilst creating sustainable value.

Prerequisites

None

Delivery style

• Face-to-face, presenter-taught workshop
• Online workshop via the platform Zoom

Materials

All course materials are provided electronically (via Dropbox). Printing services are not provided.