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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Design-Led Strategy: Design thinking for business strategy and entrepreneurship by The University of Sydney

4.6
stars
1,183 ratings

About the Course

This course is for entrepreneurial managers who are looking for tools and techniques to introduce exciting, innovative products or services to market quickly and informed by high-quality customer insights. It is applicable to a range of organizations from small-medium sized enterprises through to corporates, and across a range of industrial segments. The problem this course helps address is the constant pressure managers face to be innovative and introduce novel products and services for their customers. However, many creative ideas get ‘stuck’ in the boardroom or are subject to intra-organizational tensions or group think. This course provides methodologies to break through these challenges. We build on the widely known concept of design thinking but update it and apply it to advance business strategy and entrepreneurship. Over five weeks you will learn what ‘design strategy’ is, how it differs from traditional design thinking and business strategy, and how it can be used to improve existing products or services in your business, or introduce breakthrough ideas. We will also provide an exclusive, deep-dive into the practical application and impact of these strategies in one of Australia’s newest, most innovative financial institutions, UBank, and the global re-insurance giant, Swiss Re. Through conversations with their Senior Executive Leadership Teams, including UBank’s CEO, we will explore how they have embedded innovation through design thinking. By the end of this course, you will have a set of tools to inform product design and development for your own start-up, or to extend the product roadmap of an established organization....

Top reviews

JJ

Aug 19, 2019

This was very interesting and detailed oriented learning experience, giving insights towards the overall design leg strategy and components of creating a design led customer driven value proposition.

DG

Feb 7, 2021

This is great course. It was informative, relevant to today's way of working and it was enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Many thanks to the team at Univeristy of Sydney who delivered this course,

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1 - 25 of 304 Reviews for Design-Led Strategy: Design thinking for business strategy and entrepreneurship

By Mateusz K

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Jul 3, 2019

Course description claims it to be intermediate. Unfortunately this course is pretty basic. Might be good for beginners that never heard about Business Mode Canvas or Design Thinking. If you know anything about those, then you should skip this course. There is enough content for long blog post plus two real life cases. Which are good idea but are presented in very shallow manner. Instead, for example, presenting how prototypes progressed, speaker just says that they started with one prototype and end with seven and how much they learned from it.

By Emily C

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Oct 12, 2020

Not intermediate at all- beginner's class for Design Thinking. Lack of Strategy component- just 99% design thinking.

By Subeer K

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Dec 10, 2020

It's really an excellent course for UX professionals. It takes deep insight from the design thinking process to Design Strategy to Corporate Strategy. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

By NATALIE C T L

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Aug 18, 2020

This course is a very useful and excellent course I would say. Well comprehend and I love the part which brings in real life examples of how Swiss Re and Ubank used the design strategy.

By Omar A

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Mar 10, 2020

Good course, very consistant with a new approche to define strategy with design thinking method. the tools are very useful.

By Navneet G

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Dec 28, 2019

This course is a good effort in getting the best of both Business Model Canvas and Design Thinking.

However, like most of other courses on Coursera, this course can become much better by creating depth in content and interviews etc. For people in the know of both these topics, this course loses steam in first few sessions while for the uninitiated it does not build much depth except prompting them learn about these topics.

By Felipe V

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Jul 12, 2020

This course is extremely basic and isn't really worth your time. The weekly assignments aren't challenging nor highly revealing and the whole course could've been summarized in a single week as part of a bigger one. The final assessment is the creation of a Business Model Canvas which isn't really explained in the lessons and you could just Google how to make it if you've never seen one before. The main instructor Eric Knight barely appears in the course and all the lessons are provided by Dr Carla Harris; this is actually the only good thing about the course since she is very well prepared and knowledgeable. Still there are way better design thinking courses in Coursera so check out those before because sadly this one isn't worth it.

By Dr D M

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Dec 10, 2022

Really helped me in getting the nuances on how to apply design thinking to the application of the Business strategy. There are times the internal customers (people who are actually going to implement the strategy) are overlooked in the process. The critical step between Planning and execution is "communication", this course gave me unique insights on that. Thanks Coursera.

By Komal B

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May 23, 2020

The course successfully teaches you the basics of design thinking and design strategy. It really makes you think through the entire course and gives some amazing articles and blogs to read. It really helped me in understanding the basics and making me an enthusiast in design thinking. Will definitely apply all the knowledge that i gained here in my work.

By Alejandro B

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May 22, 2020

Great Introduction to Design thinking with well-made and direct to the point videos, having Dr. Harris as a great communicator. This is a sister course of Innovation through design offered by Coursera and both of them bring a better experience on to Design Thinking Philosophy

By Nayanjeet C

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Apr 2, 2023

Excellent course for beginners in Design Thinking! I recommend professionals from all backbackgroundsjoin it to get functional knowledge of the principles. The faculty are excellent, and the organization of the course is very coherent. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

By Lubi L N

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Sep 18, 2021

The course material was well packed and perfectly delivered. You would feel like is classroom-based. I think customer journey mapping should be included. Overall it was interesting and insightful.

By Daniel G

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Feb 8, 2021

This is great course. It was informative, relevant to today's way of working and it was enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Many thanks to the team at Univeristy of Sydney who delivered this course,

By Rocio L

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Sep 7, 2020

It's a very valuable and professional course. If you are starting your own business this course will help you to solve many doubts on the process of problem resolution and planning.

By Hamsa S

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Jun 12, 2018

Amazing demonstration of Strategy and design thinking through various examples and scenarios with UBank and SwissRe. Really loved the way the course has been structured and appreciate Carla Harris for brilliant narration.

By Sergio E

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Oct 27, 2023

I would recommend this course as a starting point to someone is interested on the topic, who doesn't have working experience and is not related to Design thinking. The course has good content, assignments are very light/mindful and the course itself presents a good vision related to business strategy, it mainly focuses on design thinking nonetheless.

By Jad S

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Apr 20, 2020

Very insightful course.

I did appreciate the way the design thinking principles were clarified and the real world business examples, which were very interesting.

What I missed though is a greater emphasis on the link between the business strategy and design thinking and a greater clarification on how to make the best use of the latter for the first.

By Henry N

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May 26, 2020

It was a bit too basic and lacked the depth I expected in how to utilize the tools. I know a little bit more about the tools discussed in this course now. But I haven't really acquired a greater skill level in them.

By Sven P

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Mar 22, 2021

This course is a beginners Design Thinking class. Thus, the description of the course is misleading. Concerning strategy, the only focus is on the Business Model Canvas. The case studies are limited to financial institutions.

By Markus W

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Mar 4, 2021

Monologues instead of didactics; could be delivered as Podcast ;-(

No suitable, accompanying learning material

By dipti a

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Jan 29, 2021

Overall, this was a good course. Wide range of learning modes were used including Guest and faculty lectures, case studies and assignments (both objective and subjective). The course was well structured and uniformly distributed across 5 weeks which made it easier for working professionals like me to complete within the schedule. However, there are a couple of things which can be improved: The peer review can be more elaborate and categorized so that there is an apple to apple comparison between the assignments. Also, if we can add a few more frameworks from corporate perspective, it will be great. All in all, a good use of my time and will definitely help me in my day to day professional life.

By Isabelle M

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Jun 29, 2024

Excellent course! I found this course highly useful, especially if you are interested in building out your knowledge in the area of Innovation & Design Thinking. I love the case studies with UBank and Swiss Re as they are highly relateable, so are also some of the articles/sources provided as well as the working material. I love the exercise of thinking outside the box and brainstorming how Design Led Strategy could be implemented outside your business or work. Excellent and thank you for making this so valuable!

By Oleg V

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Aug 5, 2021

The solid and well-balanced course mostly focused on beginners, however, some pro tips are also there. Great opportunity to learn Design strategy implementation of refresh knowledge if you are already familiar with this methodology. Thank you for the course! learning process feedback: Some topics should be investigated in a bit deeper manner and provide examples (at least for POV and PDS). As well as some sources should be updated to more contemporary to reflect current business trends and situation.

By Rajesh P

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Jul 23, 2019

It was my pleasure to go through the course, the content of the course has been well thought through, quality of the videos were too good. If offered enough opportunity to do home work. I feel worth attending the course to update on the fundamentals of design thinking,.

One suggestion....The course is still one way, can you make it interactive (involving facilitator) , may be new dimension to e learning.

By Aditya J

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Oct 7, 2020

The course helped me in understanding the nuances of design thinking and gave me a broader perspective to approach a business problem and solving it by looking at all the possible solutions. Once listed, each solution itself could open up a new business strategy apt for the organization esp the Business Canvas model. The faculty was great in delivering the sessions. Cheers to the team !!