Class Details
Leading Responsible Innovation Course: Strategic Design and System Thinking
Course summary
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 can be prototyped and tested. 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.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
- understand strategic design principles for leading innovation
- understand organisational and market complexity through system thinking
- utilise responsible innovation frameworks and methods
- lead responsible innovations to address unintended consequences for sustainable impact
- utilise system thinking tools when leading innovation
- map the path to change using theory of change
- develop practical applications with innovation principles and second order thinking.
Content
Leading responsible 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
Strategic design principles
- Human-centered inspiration
- System thinking principles and methods
- Second order thinking
- Innovation’s role in creating stakeholder (as well as shareholder) value
- Theory of change
Practical applications
- The role of wayfinding leadership in innovation
- Strategic design in the workplace
- Responsible innovation in the workplace
- Emerging frameworks
Who this course is for
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).
Sessions
Location
Face-to-face (Venue TBA, Sydney)
Other information
If your upcoming class is Face-to-face (Venue TBA, Sydney), the class is located at the Camperdown/Darlington campus but the exact classroom and building has not been assigned.
The exact location on campus is confirmed approximately five business days from a class start date and you will then receive a course preparation email with this information.
Meet the facilitators
Leila Alem
Adjunct Professor Leila Alem brings 25+ years of experience in partnering with industry to solve complex problems and deliver impact in a range of industries. Her expertise includes designing award-winning digital products and new customer experiences leveraging emerging technologies such as AI, Wearables, AR/ VR and MR and using Design Thinking, Lean Start-up and Agile methodologies. She has over 10 years of experience in entrepreneurship, building new innovation programs and practices to drive client engagement. Her corporate entrepreneurship experience includes the government and consulting sectors.
Leila has an extensive experience in teaching at undergraduate, Master and corporate levels both in Australia and overseas. Her subjects include innovation, entrepreneurship, lean startup, design thinking, system thinking, technology disruptors etc. She has taught in the award-winning UTS Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation, in the University of Sydney Master of Design and UTS executive MBA. She won the 2013 NSW State Innovation Award in R&D and was a finalist for The Women Infotech Outstanding Career Achievements Award in 2015.
Leila holds a PhD is in Artificial Intelligence and is a member of the National AI Think Thank. Her research draws on real industry challenges to explore novel ways of working, learning and collaborating using AI, VR, AR and IOT. She has 150+ peer-reviewed publications and is the editor of books and international journals in the next frontiers of Human-Computer Interaction.
Leila is currently an Adjunct Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at UTS. She was Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks, a global innovation consulting firm, for 2 years and Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO for 23 years.
