Design Thinking and Business Innovation: Final Presentations at the University of St. Gallen on July 6th, 2009
The relationship between Design Thinking and Management is receiving a lot of attention recently and it seems that managers can indeed achieve superior results when they apply a “design mindset” to solve business problems. At the University of St. Gallen we have a unique course called Design Thinking and Business Innovation which is based on a cooperation between Prof. Walter Brenner, University of St. Gallen and Prof. Larry Leifer, Stanford University, to teach master students the philosophy and principles of Design Thinking. Four weeks after the presentation in Stanford, the final presentation and design exhibition are scheduled for July 6th 2009, 12:30 – 16:00 at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.
As a reader of this site I would like to invite you to join our presentation and experience the design process and the prototypes that our student design teams have developed for our corporate partners.
Our students and corporate partners
The course is based on the Stanford ME310 course that has been taught at Stanford University for more than 30 years and which has been adopted to meet the special environment and requirements at a business school. A team of students together with a corporate partner will work on a problem statement to develop a conceptual solution by following a methodology that focuses heavily on prototypes. This year’s corporate partners were BASF, Lonza and Swisscom and our students have spent the last 10 months to solve the given problem and come up with innovative solutions.
The project proposals
- BASF: Total Packaging Design for Printers
- Lonza: Harvest the creativity and the knowledge of the scientific community
- Swisscom: Services for Enabling Home Networking Adoption
The end of a exciting journey for this year’s class
At the final presentation the student teams are going to present their final conceptual prototype as well as the milestones that lead them to this prototype and the learnings and considerations that formed their decisions. Our students have been working long hours and many nights to find the most promising solution and they have once again shown the great results that a team of motivated student is able to achieve.
Join our presentations!
One month after the presentations and EXPE in Stanford, on Monday July 6th 2009 , the students will present their projects in St.Gallen. They will show their developed prototypes, insights, results as well as the design development process. After the presentation there will be an exhibition (EXPE) where visitors will be able to experience the different prototypes and talk to the student designers.
The event takes place at the University of St. Gallen in the Temporary Teaching Buildings (Lehrprovisorium, see campus map) on July 6th. Reception starts at 12:00, presentations start at 12:30 and the exhibition is scheduled to start at 15:30. For detailed instructions please have a look at the campus map.
Please RSVP if you are planning to attend, you can reach me at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com
