Design Thinking, a 6-session module

This is an outline of a six-session module on Design Thinking I am teaching for an executive MBA program (PGPEX VLFM) Program at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai. 

	Date	Focus	Resources / Reading
1	17-Sep-20 Thursday slides	Introduction to Design Thinking   Topics: DT as a process, 3 core elements of DT	3 E’s of Design Thinking:  Experience, Empathy and Experimentation (M) (video) IDEO shopping cart design (duration: 8:13 minutes) (M) Is “Design Thinking” old wine in a new bottle? Learning design thinking: Is it more like learning cycling or cycology? Confronting the mass market: Thomas Edison and the entertainment phonograph, Leonard DeGraaf, Business and Economic History, Fall 1995
2	18-Sep-20 Friday slides	Empathy tools   Topics: Role of empathy, Empathic interviews, Empathy-map, Journey map	(case) Husk Power Systems (3.5 pages) (M) (video) Lego story: What the company learned from its mistakes (duration: 5:20 minutes)  (M) 3 essential elements of empathic interview Empathy tips from Kahneman’s “Adversarial collaboration” 3 symptoms of empathy deficit Empathy as accessing 3 kinds of ignorance
3	24-Sep-20 Thursday slides	Challenge framing   Topics: Metaphoric thinking, Challenge framing using metaphors	(case) Ather Energy (2 pages) (M) 3 ways a metaphor helps in challenge framing 4 attributes of strategic thinking “Metaphors we live by” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Wikipedia page of the book
4	25-Sep-20 Friday slides	Idea generation & selection   Topics: Problem solving approaches – system centric, problem-centric, solution-centric and solver-centric	Four approaches to problem solving Problem solving approaches: clock-fixing vs cloud-fixing How Master Shifu follows a bright spot to train Kung Fu Panda Systematic Inventive Thinking (Wikipedia page) Overcoming prediction disability: Applying Black Swan wisdom to idea selection
5	1-Oct-20 Thursday slides	Rapid prototyping   Topics: Feels-like prototypes, looks-like prototypes, works-like prototypes	(case) Google AdSense (1 page) Rapid prototyping: Feels-like, looks-like and works-like prototypes Before-and-after storyboard (video) Inside the Apple factory: Software design in the age of Steve Jobs (duration: 1 hr 36 minutes, demoing to Steve Jobs part from 53:55 to 1:09:05, duration: 16 minutes)
6	2-Oct-20 Friday	Idea presentation	An idea presentation template based on a 2-minute pitch by the Wand Company founders An idea presentation template based on Steve Jobs’ iPod launch demo