Creative Founder Class is Available!

At California College of the Arts, Creative Founder is that elective that students tell each other “You have to take it.”  We’ve been blogging our progress on medium this year, and I’ve shared our process from picking a market and market sizing, to needfinding and product charettes.

Now you can also take it, if you live in the Bay Area! I’m teaching an abbreviated version this spring at Stanford Continuing Studies. Here’s the description!

Everyone is creative, no matter what your guidance counselor said. But so many of us have forgotten how to tap into that energy. Now you want to start a company, and you need that creativity and insight more than ever. The discipline of design has tools to unlock and shape that creative energy in order to make the services and products people will pay for. This course will teach you how to apply design thinking to creating a product the market wants and needs.

In this course, you will use classic design research techniques to talk to potential users and then turn that research into product decisions. We will use the Lean Startup methodology, with its emphasis on usercentered design in the build-measure-learn cycle; and proven design thinking processes from the Business Model Canvas such as empathy maps and visual thinking. We will also explore the latest design thinking approaches such as gamestorming, rapid sketch prototypes, and embodied cognition techniques to unleash latent creativity and insights. If you are in the early stages of a company or thinking of starting one, this course will equip you with key techniques to design your way to product/market fit.

 

Or contact me to teach this at your company! I’ve given one day workshops at conference around the world as well as to internal groups.