Unfinished Business School

Play intro video

UFBS gives management teams a practical foundation for using the tools of innovation. The online learning experience unfolds over six weeks: video that you watch on your own time, activities that you do in collaboration with peers from other companies, and structured reflection with your coworkers.

Keep scrolling to learn more.

Overview

UFBS: Innovation School With No Classrooms

Week 1

The Essential Tension

with Tim Ogilvie, Peer Insight

Friction occurs everyday but most of all when we try new things. Designing for Growth shows how you can proﬁt from the tensions between innovation and optimization, rather than trying to eliminate them.

Tim Ogilvie is Co-founder and CEO of Peer Insight and a recognized leader in service innovation and customer experience design. He is also the co-author with Jeanne Liedtlka of the forthcoming book 'Designing for Growth'.

www.designingforgrowthbook.com

Week 2

Gamestorming

with Dave Gray, Xplane, Dachis Group

Games, the most developed, structured, social and scalable form of play, oﬀer the perfect mechanism for organizing collaborative, creative work in a networked economy.” We’ll explore how you can use games to make collaboration more productive and eﬀective.

Dave has done more than anyone to establish visual thinking as a core design practice discipline. From his signature visual style to his extraordinary recent work on games, Dave is a master at bringing the amazing down to earth.

www.davegrayinfo.com

Week 3

Ethnography for Everyone

with Suzanne Stein, OCAD Superordinary Lab

Observation is a powerful source of insight. Using techniques originally developed by ﬁeld anthropologists, you will learn how social research can produce revelations into possible futures.

Suzanne is a foresight analyst, ethnographer and educator. Prior to her academic career she held global leadership positions in foresight and experience design at Sapient and Nokia.

OCAD Faculty Bio

Week 4

Human-Centered Design

with Todd Zaki Warfel, Messageﬁrst

Prototypes give you inexpensive answers to important questions. They make our ideas more tangible and give us a way to experiment and test products, services and even business models before we build them.

Todd is a designer and user researcher who has been on the forefront of emerging techniques in experience and interaction design. His clients include Comcast, Sears, & Cornell University. He quite literally wrote the book on Prototyping.

www.messageﬁrst.com

Week 5

Murderboarding

with Nilofer Merchant

Murderboarding is the counterbalance to whiteboarding. As we all know, quantity of ideas does not ensure their quality. Learn to make tough decisions about what ideas are good and when they should be introduced.

Nilofer worked at GoLive and Autodesk before founding Rubicon. In addition to consulting, Nilofer is author of The New How and a regular contributor on collaboration to the Harvard Business School blog.

www.nilofermerchant.com

Week 6

Lab for Business Model Innovation

with Saul Kaplan, Business Innovation Factory

Special kinds of laboratories are needed to design businesses. Learn how enterprise can leverage the toolkit of the entrepreneur. This capstone will explore an emerging set of design tools that can be applied to your business model.

Business Innovation Factory was established by Saul to create a set of real world labs for business model innovation. BIF leads pioneering work on healthcare, education and entrepreneurship and its annual Story Summit.

www.businessinnovationfactory.com

Contact

Keep in the Loop

Interested in the Unfinished Business School? Leave your email address above, and we'll let you know when the next UFBS cohort is starting up.

And follow us in all the usual places.