About This Course

Most innovation fails. Not for lack of ideas, but because teams build solutions to problems they never validated, for users they never met, and find out after the money is spent. Design thinking is the standard corrective, and most corporate adoption of it is superficial: a workshop, some sticky notes, and back to business as usual.

This course is built for the gap that causes. It is not an introduction to what design thinking is. It is a working manual for running it. Every one of the five steps comes with the facilitation detail the textbooks leave out: who is in the room, how long it takes, what you bring, what you do, and what the output looks like when you have done it properly.

You will work through the innovation trifecta and the three phases of innovation, then take each step in turn with a real technique attached to it: empathy mapping and interview design, POV statements and design challenge scoping, How Might We questions and four ideation formats, the prototype fidelity ladder, and the Feedback Capture Grid. Each step is illustrated with a documented case that carries a measured outcome, from GE Healthcare's Adventure Series scanner to the American Refugee Committee's real-time feedback system in East African refugee settlements.

You will also learn how each step fails, because the cases in most design thinking material are all successes and the failures are what you will actually encounter. The course closes by putting the whole cycle together as a five-day design sprint you run against a problem from your own work, and by looking honestly at where generative AI belongs in this process in 2026 and where it does not.

What You'll Learn

Explain why design thinking works, using evidence rather than enthusiasm, to a sceptical stakeholder.
Evaluate an initiative against desirability, feasibility and viability before committing budget to it.
Plan and facilitate empathy research, and build an empathy map from what you gather.
Write interview questions that produce truth instead of validation.
Turn raw research into a POV statement and a well-scoped design challenge.
Generate How Might We questions at the right altitude, and pick the ideation format that suits your team.
Match prototype fidelity to the question you are actually trying to answer.
Run a structured test, organise the feedback, and decide whether to iterate, pivot or proceed.
Plan and run a five-day design sprint on a real problem.

Requirements

No prior design training. You should bring a real problem from your own work to apply the method to, and ideally some ability to talk to the people affected by it.

Source and Attribution

The five-step framework, the innovation trifecta and the five case studies in this course are drawn from Change by Design: The 5-step Human-Centered Design Process by Dr Taylor Willmott, Social Marketing @ Griffith, Griffith University. Facilitation procedures, failure modes, assessment and the AI material are additions to that source, and draw on Stanford d.school, IDEO, GV and Jeanne Liedtka's research published in Harvard Business Review.

About the course