Driving Growth and Resilience via Innovation for Business Leaders
In the times of uncertainty and complexity, organisations are constantly faced with unexpected challenges. To navigate in the ever-changing business world, many business executives sought to design as a strategy to create new values. With an aim to promote design thinking in business growth and resilience via innovation, HKDC has once again organised two bespoke modules for CUHK’s EMBA students in May 2020, the sixth year of partnership with the first EMBA programme in Hong Kong.
Co-organised by IDK and the EMBA Prorgam of CUHK Business School, the workshop series composed of two modules exploring how design thinking can drive innovation initiatives in business. For the first time, the modules adopted online learning tools so that students were able to acquaint themselves with design thinking frameworks through lectures, ideation sessions and co-creation process delivered via live online sessions. Case studies with relevance for the context in Hong Kong were given as design challenges for students to co-design new business models and solutions in a human-centric approach.
The first module, led by Prof. Vijay Kumar from Illinois Institute of Technology, introduced key principles of design planning, why they are essential in the business world nowadays, and how they work in real-life practice. Students worked in groups as a “task force” to uncover insights and plan for creating new human-centred innovations on business models related to Hong Kong’s public services, and arrived at creative new solutions that were presented in highly interactive ways in the online pitching sessions.
In the second module, Prof Paul Hekkert from Delft University of Technology explored business topics of safety in the internet, public space and transportation. After deconstructing how daily objects and scenarios provide a sense of safety, students were able to propose new goods and services that react to safe experiences in the future as their group work.
Designed to be both inspiring and stimulating, the workshops prompted students to rethink human behaviours and needs are at core of innovations. One pointed out, “this new way of thinking changed the way how we see problems and the world.”
