The world’s most successful organizations do not simply react to problems—they design innovative solutions that transform industries, improve lives, and create lasting competitive advantage. Whether developing breakthrough products, improving customer experiences, redesigning business models, or solving organizational challenges, leaders increasingly rely on design thinking and creative problem-solving to navigate complexity and uncertainty. At its core, design thinking is a human-centered approach that combines empathy, curiosity, experimentation, strategic thinking, and disciplined execution to generate meaningful innovation.
Design Thinking & Creative Problem Solving is a practical, executive-oriented course designed to equip Junior MBA students with the mindset and frameworks used by innovative leaders, entrepreneurs, and global organizations to solve complex business challenges. Rather than emphasizing abstract creativity or theoretical innovation models, the course focuses on practical methods for understanding customer needs, generating breakthrough ideas, testing solutions rapidly, and building organizations that embrace continuous improvement.
Students will explore human-centered innovation, empathy, opportunity discovery, creative thinking, ideation systems, decision-making, prototyping, behavioral psychology, systems thinking, collaboration, artificial intelligence, organizational innovation, and strategic implementation. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on practical executive application, preparing future leaders to solve problems creatively while creating sustainable business value.
Course Objectives
By the conclusion of this course, students will be able to:
• Understand design thinking as a strategic framework for innovation and leadership.
• Develop human-centered approaches to solving business and organizational problems.
• Apply structured creative thinking techniques to generate innovative solutions.
• Analyze customer behavior and unmet needs through empathy-driven observation.
• Build effective problem-solving systems that reduce uncertainty and improve decision-making.
• Integrate experimentation and rapid learning into organizational strategy.
• Understand the relationship between innovation, customer experience, and competitive advantage.
• Foster collaborative environments that encourage creativity and continuous improvement.
• Apply emerging technologies and artificial intelligence to innovation processes.
• Develop executive leadership skills that drive organizational transformation through innovation.
