Enhance your creative problem-solving skills by discovering your personal thinking preferences, identifying and eliminating mental blocks, and elevating your communication and teaming skills.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.