Future Proofing Your Business
Develop the skills, experience and mindset to turn bright ideas into brilliant business opportunities.
With the threat of disruption closing in on all sides, many businesses are facing the same set of challenges: an uncertainty about what problems to solve, slow speed to market, and difficulties bringing all parts of the business together to make meaningful innovation happen.
We'll help you tackle these challenges head on. Drawing on concepts from service design, experimentation and the lean startup method, you'll learn how to rapidly pinpoint where your business can provide innovation to the market, uncover opportunities to innovate, prototype your ideas, and build service experiences that work for both you and your customers.
What you'll learn
This four-week intensive program is dense, jam-packed and not for the faint-hearted. You will work hard, and walk away with new insights, skills and a head of steam on your own project. It’s backed by theory and driven by practical experience. You'll explore innovation in the context of a real-world problem, and practice key problem-solving techniques that you can bring back to your business.
Through live experience sessions, you'll engage in a mix of content delivery, guided discussions, hands-on activities and reflection. Through a personal project, you'll learn how to put your new skills and knowledge into practice.
You will develop critical skills that will:
- Aid in identifying opportunities for customer and business innovation
- Develop the creative confidence you need for innovative problem-solving
- Learn how to validate ideas and ground your decisions in insight
These skills will accelerate your ability to:
- Take ideas from a concept to a service delivery model that spans your entire business
- Identify opportunities for business model innovation
- Find out what it takes to put innovation at the heart of your business.
Learning outcomes
Each week, we'll use the design thinking process as a pathway to innovation – breaking it down into logical stages. Through this, you'll discover how to future-proof your business and find opportunities to provide unique value to customers.
You'll learn how to use real customer insights, approach problem-solving through a range of techniques, get hands-on prototyping experience and map out the details of the end-to-end service experience.
Week by week, you'll:
Reimagine and understand
Unpack the concepts of service design and systems thinking to discover a more holistic view of how to deliver value to customers.
Prototype and experiment
Transition your idea from concept to reality through a series of simple prototyping steps that allow you to validate the ideas that you have for providing value with real customers.
Analyse and create
Using a customer centric approach, determine the most valuable problems to solve and transform your research and insights into solutions.
Orchestrate and deliver
Take your prototype and turn it into a service blueprint that considers an end-to-end experience that will enable customers to engage in the experience you've designed for them.
Learning journey
Over a four-week learning journey, you'll be invited to explore innovation in the context of a real-world problem, and practice key techniques that will enable innovative problem-solving in your own organisation.
Details
Who should attend?
This program is designed for Leaders and Managers who are doers—not philosophers—and value real results over theory.
To extract the full value from this program, please plan on protecting 10-15 hours of work each week over the first four weeks to make your way through the full range of activities shown above.
Program dates and times
Virtual live experience sessions run Wednesday from 23 August - 17 September 2021. Homework sessions run Tuesdays.
Session times and details confirmed upon registration.
Program fee
$2,195
Monash Alumni receive a 20% discount
Digital badging
Upon successful completion of this program, you will be awarded a digital badge to share with your network. Find out more about digital badges.
Need more information?
Contact us at T: +61 3 9903 1300 or E: buseco-exec-ed@monash.edu.
Facilitator
Julia Birks
Program Director
Affiliate
With 16 years’ industry experience spanning industrial, print, digital and service design, Julia is passionate about anchoring an organisation's strategy around great customer experiences and outcomes-driven work.
Julia has delivered UX and service design projects, ranging from expert reviews, website redesigns, digital strategies, current state service mapping and future state service design. She has worked with a variety of industries, including state and federal government, finance, telecoms, education and health. She loves facilitating, and using design thinking and an iterative approach to solve complex organisational problems.
More recently, she's been helping organisations and teams to work better together by embedding principles and practices that balance customer needs with organisational viability and feasibility. Through this work, she's delivered training and capability uplift programs to some of Australia's biggest brands, and worked with leaders to create engaging, transparent, and human-centred organisational cultures that create change through iterative experimentation. She has taught design at RMIT, General Assembly, Monash University, and QUT.
Her post-graduate diploma thesis was the design of a below-the-knee prosthesis for high-performance surfing. She is passionate about mentoring young designers through their careers, and promoting more human and inclusive workplaces. She sits on the committee for the SDNow Conference in Australia, and on the Board for the Spectrum app which is seeking to improve mental health and wellbeing outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth.