The course Personal Skills - Design Thinking is an intensive 2.5-day course designed to educate, empower and inspire participants to develop creative and user-oriented solutions to complex problems. Design Thinking allows organizations to understand their customers and potential future users, challenge previous assumptions, redefine problems and create innovations in an iterative process. It represents a universal creative technique applicable to diverse contexts.

The course will provide students with insights into the basics, the process and the application of the Design Thinking method along the five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Testing. Students will improve their creativity and problem-solving skills, which will allow them to drive entrpereneurial activities in their environment.

This course is offered in collaboration with a Design Thinking Consultant from IBM. The curriculum starts with a brief theoretical background on well-established concepts. The central part will cover various interactive exercises in which students will develop, adapt and reflect their Design Thinking and presentation skills.

After completing this course, students will have the ability to:

• Understand how to use Design Thinking for creative problem solving
• Critically reflect upon when to use Design Thinking
• Creating and selecting creative ideas

Attendance: To pass this course, your absence is limited to 20% of our appointments.

Please note that full-time presence on the first day of the course is obligatory!

50% in-class trainings (group assessment)

30% in-class training (individual assessment)

20% reflection paper (individual assessment)

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