All Certificate Programs
Foundations in Design Thinking
Learn and practice the core concepts of design thinking from IDEO—the company that has been honing the methods of a human-centered approach to business for over 40 years. We’ve designed this program to give you a foundational, practical understanding of the essential design thinking skills and mindsets.
Certificate Program Outcomes
- Gain techniques to better understand the social, emotional, and physical needs of your customers.
- Apply methods that will help you turn your customer needs into human-centered solutions.
- Use ideation techniques to quickly generate, develop, and test new ideas.
- De-risk your new ideas by gaining feedback through rapid prototypes.
- Showcase your new skills through tangible, real-world project challenges, like an insights report or prototypes of products and services.
Change Leadership
Learn a human-centered approach to change leadership. Unlike traditional change management, this program will help you put people, not process, at the center of your change journey. Explore how to think in systems to understand the big picture, gain context around the change you seek, spot opportunities, and choose where to start. Use frameworks that will show you how to start small, co-create, and experiment with others to design your change and build support. Discover strategies to navigate the friction and complexity that are often part of implementing and scaling change.
Certificate Program Outcomes
- Apply systems thinking techniques to spot opportunities and determine where to start.
- Co-create change by involving the people it affects from the beginning.
- Start small by creating experiments that demonstrate the potential for your change.
- Build support by sharing big stories about early, small changes.
- Motivate your team to scale the change by developing shared understanding and alignment.
Human-Centered Insights
The Human-Centered Insights certificate combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to design research to help you illuminate new and unexpected customer insights. In Insights for Innovation, you’ll learn how to develop empathy for your customers by better understanding their social, emotional, and behavioral needs through interview, observation, and immersion techniques. In Innovating with Data, you’ll learn the data-side of design research, including how to spot patterns, uncover opportunities and surface the human stories reflected in your data. Together, these two courses will give you a comprehensive approach to user insights, enabling you to dive beneath the obvious and unlock opportunities to build products, services, and systems that address the real needs of your customers.
Bonus: Receive our exclusive Guide to Communicating Data Insights & Visualizations upon completion of the certificate.
Certificate Program Outcomes
- Become customer-centric in your approach to innovation and problem solving.
- Make connections and spot opportunities that others miss by applying design research tools and techniques.
- Build better products, services, and systems by surfacing and developing empathy for unmet customer pain points.
- Make your insights more memorable and inspiring by crafting compelling narratives and data visualizations.
Business Innovation Certificate
Learn an accessible and actionable process to do the work of innovation, no matter your role or industry. This process helps you imagine new strategic possibilities, quickly and inexpensively test to de-risk these possibilities, and build compelling business cases to grow confidence and consensus. In this program, you’ll learn how to merge creative thinking with analytical rigor, develop ways to grow influence around your ideas, and get to bold, new products and services faster—all while staying tightly aligned with the needs of your customers and the realities of your business or organization. Whether you work in business, government, education, or nonprofit, this certificate will help you drive and follow through on innovative initiatives.Certificate Program Outcomes
Advanced Design Thinking
Advance your design thinking skills and have a greater impact through your work with this action-oriented learning experience. We’ve designed this program to help you move from understanding the core concepts of design thinking to practicing and applying these concepts in different scenarios in order to build your confidence to solve complex problems in the real world. Through extended practice, you’ll improve your ability to apply design thinking to your own work.Certificate Program Outcomes
Human-Centered Strategy Certificate
This certificate program will give you the tools and mindsets to design a winning strategy and ensure that strategy is actionable for your team and organization. In Designing Strategy, you’ll learn how to identify your strategic options and apply a customer-centric strategy process to help you make winning choices. In Activating Strategy, you’ll learn how to activate those choices by engaging stakeholders within your organization and building the shared understanding, alignment, and conditions teams need to deliver on strategy. People across an organization make strategic choices every day. No matter where you sit in your organization, this program can help you ensure teams and individuals can move confidently from strategy to action.Certificate Program Outcomes
Communicating for Impact Certificate
Strong communication skills and the ability to influence others are critical in order to have impact at work and beyond. We’ve designed this program for anyone who wants to shape and express their ideas more clearly, craft convincing messages, and share information effectively. You’ll learn to apply mindsets and techniques from human-centered design—like empathy, prototyping, and creativity—in order to communicate in ways that engage, persuade, and shift the way people think, feel, and behave. You’ll get the most out of this program if you have some experience sharing ideas with others and giving presentations as this program will help you build upon your foundational experience to develop more powerful communication skills.Certificate Program Outcomes
Collaborative Leadership
Leading projects across teams is hard, even harder if you don’t directly manage the teams. How do you break through silos and change the way people work together? How do you unite others around a common goal? How do you lead day-in and day-out to tackle complex strategic work or bring a new idea to life? In this program, learn to become a collaborative leader—one who’s confident, empathetic, and effective at leading diverse teams. You’ll use the principles of human-centered design to make your leadership actionable and tangible when guiding projects and initiatives. This program is designed to help you become a more influential leader within your company or organization, no matter where you sit.Certificate Program Outcomes
Foundations in Creative Leadership
Learn a unique approach to leadership that will help you tackle today’s complex challenges by navigating ambiguity, collaborating across diversity, and maintaining momentum with optimism. Leadership today is not about knowing all the answers, but turning uncertain conditions into growth opportunities. We’ve designed this program to help you build the skills and confidence necessary to create the conditions for new kinds of collaboration across a diversity of perspectives.Certificate Program Outcomes