Integrating Design Thinking with Business analytics

A Hong Kong based university approached MAKE during the development of their Master in Business Analytics (MSBA) programme, where they recognised that expertise in Design Thinking, innovative problem solving and investigating complex challenges would be beneficial to the future of their postgraduate students.

The university was looking to design and deliver a tailored programme built to empower students with the mindset, methodologies and best practices of Design Thinking within the context of their course.  Exposing students to the real life complexity of business and equipping them with tools to build their own critical problem solving models will help improve their competitiveness and employability upon graduation, ultimately making a very strong and respected course even better.

MAKE took the opportunity to showcase the full extent of our team's Design Thinking skills to empower the future leaders in our field through their new course curriculum. Our aim was to give them the focus, skills and confidence in their abilities upon graduation, and to unlock their curiosity and continued creativity in problem-solving once they hit the workforce.

We explored problems that centered around people’s lives, and how products and services can best support their needs, as well as specific challenges and ambitions that would help students leverage their design thinking skill set and learned tools. Through our lecture and workshop series, we aimed to orient student’s mindsets to be one that interrogates and works to understand problems with humans at the core, and how these intersect with business needs to solve the world’s most complex challenges.

MAKE collaborated with the University’s talented team to design and deliver a fresh, innovative program that would equip students with the tools they need to have an impactful career, with Design Thinking becoming yet another critical tool in their toolkit. 

We undertook desk research to gather and analyse existing information and data from a range of sources, and built an empathy map to reframe our thinking and better understand user’s expectations. From there we employed a t-ideas strategy to generate a range of creative ideas in several mediums taking them to paper prototypes that we could use to test the user experience through a series of wireframes and mockups.

Students were invited to create innovative solutions and present their designs to the group in the form of a creative pitch.

The team at MAKE supported the final session with content around storytelling and pitching for students to help them round out the programme with learnings around the art of the sell, connecting to clients and capturing short attention spans.

Following the workshops, the University organised a pitching contest for the students to present their final solutions to a group of professors and potential investors.

We’re delighted to have been invited back to continue our work delivering this workforce-ready programme to students in the new academic year.