Masterclass on Design thinking for WISEs
On the 28th and 29th of November, in Zagreb, ACT Grupa organised a Masterclass training on “Design Thinking – The problem solving and business management discipline that empowers you to be the change leader within transformational context”. The participants were managers and workers from WISEs selected by the project partners, three from each participating country: Poland, Slovenia, Croatia and Italy.
The goal of the training was to help the participants to deal with the “design” of solutions, services, products or plans. Those designs can then be used in any area, for any kind of problem. The goal was to equip them so they can face any challenge from competitiveness issue to shifting markets, social issues, transformations within their organisations, … Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems.
The goal of “Design Thinking” is to improve the likelihood of a solution being relevant and accepted. The main principles of “Design Thinking” are: user centred, inclusiveness, sequence thinking, evidencing, and holistic thinking -which can indeed be applied to any area of a business. Overall, the skills which the participants will need to develop are: researching, identifying problems, analysing, evaluating, synthesizing, conceptualizing, testing and reasoning. During this training, the lecturer addressed various questions such as “Team formulation”, “Research and understanding”, “Strategic criteria and filtering”, “Ideation”, “Implementation action plans”.
The lecturer of this masterclass was Ana Brigovic, a Market focused business consultant with experience in all aspects of marketing and advertising before going into strategy and business development. She is currently managing an acceleration program for impact entrepreneurs and focus on mentoring in various programs.
The project will organise another masterclass, still focused on “Design Thinking” in Vienna, Austria. It will again be open to project partner’s members and affiliated. You’ll be able to find the guidelines of these masterclass on our new web platform soon, so anyone will be able to benefit from this training!
