Anders Richtnér

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to develop not only products and services, but it is also used to devise strategy and manage change. It encourages the creation of new opportunities. It is an interactive and a team-based approach to develop innovations that are technologically feasible, economically viable, but most important desirable from a human point of view. Instead of talking about design thinking during the lecture you will all be part of doing design thinking. The starting point is what is happening in your business and company. From there we will tap into the vast experience of the people participating and together co-create a prototype of tomorrows offering. The lecture will take you through the whole design thinking process from the initial challenge to the end of the process with presentations of prototypes and potential solutions that impact people’s lives.

Some companies seem to stand out in terms of having an innovative company culture. It is easy to get inspiration from comparatively young companies such as Google and Facebook, but we also marvel at some older companies such as Apple, Procter & Gamble, 3M, and General Electric to name a few, who have been able to reinvent themselves. As we look at these it is easy to ask: “How do these companies do it?” Research has told us the corporate culture is a much more important driver of radical innovation than labor, capital, government or national culture. This raises two questions: 1) what is an innovation corporate culture? and 2) how can you build one? In the lecture we combine findings from research in the form of a practical 360° assessment tool managers can use to assess how conducive their corporate culture is to innovation – and discuss specific areas where their culture might be more encouraging to it.

Excellence in teaching is a workshop aiming to help everyone concerned with teaching answer two questions: First, how do teachers develop excellence in their teaching? And second, what sort of environment can help them do so? The background is an inductive study on excellence in teaching and what the best teachers do Anders has conducted at Babson College, Harvard Business School, and MIT. During the workshop we discuss that achieving excellence in teaching is about much more than planning, executing, and concluding a course. It also means carefully framing the “why” or “big picture” of the course, creating specific dynamics, including a close rapport with students, and aiming to initiate a never-ending learning journey. The workshop discuss how an organization and its actors can strike the right balance between stability and change, they can set in motion a virtuous cycle in which excellence is created and recreated.