Innovative Thinking
Enhance your creative problem-solving skills by discovering your personal thinking preferences, identifying and eliminating mental blocks, and elevating your communication and teaming skills.
Delivery
Online
Duration
12 Weeks
Commitment
8-10 Hours per Week
Instructor Rating
3.7 / 4
Truly innovative thinking allows us to create real value when we develop new products and services. In this course, we’ll build the creative confidence that enables us to be fearless innovators. You’ll drive your business concept further and more efficiently as you identify and eliminate mental blocks, and boost your creative problem solving skills.
What You'll Learn
- Learn how to employ the powerful “design thinking” methodology to reduce waste in innovation
- Cultivate creativity in yourself and on your team with visual thinking
- Champion human-centered entrepreneurship with a focus on user testing
- Improve your ability to advocate for your new ideas and recruit support
Who Will Benefit
- Aspiring entrepreneurs working to identify a viable new business idea from which to develop their own company.
- Active entrepreneurs seeing to validate and enhance their existing business idea and accelerate their company’s success.
- Corporate professionals interested in understanding how business and technology shape the creation of new products and services by established companies.
- Educators, consultants, and organizational leads desiring to improve their capacity to teach, advise, or empower their constituencies to succeed in startup entrepreneurship or corporate innovation.
Course Topics
Module 1: Introduction to Innovative Thinking
This module includes a welcome to the course, an orientation to our teaching approach and faculty, and an introduction to visual thinking.
Module 2: Design Thinking
What is design thinking? Human centered. Experiment heavy. Framing your challenge. Design thinking models.
Module 3: Visual Thinking
The power of visual thinking. How and when to get visual. Graphic facilitation. Why and how to prototype.
Module 4: Researching Your Business Concept with Real Users
What you'll learn from user testing. Good interview technique. Avoiding bias in your research.
Module 5: Setting the Stage for Breakthrough Innovation
Nurturing your own creativity. Seeing with the world around you. The power of mentorship and self-educaion. Exploring random subcultures.
Module 6: Making Collaboration Fundamental to Your Work
Collaboration and diversity. Crowdsourcing innovation. Cross-pollination and team configuration. Refining your idea with customer co-creation. Benefits of collaboration.
Module 7: Brainstorming
When should you use brainstorming? Rules for brainstorming. Stoking exercises. Valuing quantity over quality. Lenses and constraints.
Module 8: Bias Towards Actions
Rapid prototyping and development. Lean startup MVPs. Inspiration to move you to action.
Module 9: Creating a Supportive Environment for Innovation
The impact of physical space. Creating a supportive environment for innovation. Creating a soft landing for risk takers.
Module 10: Making Change Happen
The emotional and logical components of behavioral change. Directing the rider. Motivating the elephant. Shaping the path.
Module 11: Communicating Your Ideas Effectively
Recruiting people to your cause. The value of storytelling, The curse of knowledge. Good storytelling.
Module 12: Next Steps
Design thinking. Visual thinking. Setting the stage. Making change happen.
Learning Experience
Asynchronous Lectures
Coaching and Mentoring
Live Office Hours
Peer Interactions and Networking
Project-Based Learning
Real-World Assignments
Faculty
Frankie Abralind
Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute
University of Maryland
Frankie Abralind is executive director of The Good Listening Project, a nonprofit that promotes good listening in hospitals. He is a member of the graduate faculty at the University of Maryland, teaching in the Master of Professional Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation. Frankie's expertise is in design thinking, experience design, and user research.
Previously, Frankie served as the lead designer for the Innovation Hub at Sibley Memorial Hospital, where he worked on improving the healthcare experience for patients, staff, and visitors. Frankie is a champion of radical collaboration on methodologies, practices, and experiences to facilitate and deliver innovation in the world.
He earned his MBA at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and a BS in Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University.
Take a Peek at Innovative Thinking
Our no-cost pre-application is the first step to the formal application, and allows our admissions team to give you a preliminary assessment of the strength of your application.
