Cohort 1

Drive breakthrough innovation using creative problem-solving techniques and effective stakeholder management with multidisciplinary teams.

Kevin Bethune

Founder & Chief Creative Officer, dreams • design + life  |  Best-selling Author, Reimagining Design

Unlocking Strategic Innovation through Effective Design Leadership

dreams • design + life

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Nike

Westinghouse Nuclear

Is this happening to you or your teams? 🔥 Feeling marginalized as a designer within the organization (compared to business &amp; tech voices) 🔥 Struggling to find support (time, budget, late stakeholder involvement, etc.) 🔥 Encountering risk aversion to pursuing big ideas with new, innovative approaches 🔥 Fighting through the organization's resistance to change while the market is quickly evolving Design represents an important voice in shaping the future, but it can't operate in a vacuum. The complexities of our time (e.g., generative AI, economic uncertainty, climate change, cultural movements, etc.) require multidisciplinary, creative problem-solving more than ever. If your a design practitioner or design leader, this course will give you more courage (vs. paralysis) in your work. You'll figure out ways to break through the glass ceiling of misunderstanding and friction when collaborating with tech and business peers. You'll learn ways to build stakeholder empathy, strategic influence and a renewed sense of optimism that you can translate diverse insights and inspiration into meaningful innovation. What we'll cover together: • Debunk design's misperceptions and explore the ways designers can influence up and down the value chain• Optimize multidisciplinary teaming by building effective stakeholder management skills when engaging business &amp; tech colleagues• Develop future foresight by learning how to curate trends and anticipate many possible (even plausible) future scenarios• Exploring the connections between design &amp; diversity to give you strategies to evolve your team to mirror the world and its needs• Foster design transformation by understanding implications on your organization's design roles, methods and key enablers This live 2-week interactive course, inspired from my first book Reimagining Design (The MIT Press), provides a safe-space to share perspectives, frameworks and tactics on how to elevate design's impact within multidisciplinary teams to unlock meaningful innovation and inspire future growth opportunities for your organization. "Chatham House Rules" apply for each live-session and any asynchronous conversations on the Maven platform. Why do I want to serve as your instructor? I want to share tips and tricks that will help you cut through the organizational noise and friction that often gets in our way of making impact with our design skills. From my experience building, growing and serving creative teams at places like Nike and BCG, I want you to get up the learning curve much faster.

Feeling stuck on your big idea? Don't go it alone. Multidisciplinary is the way!

Experienced Design Practitioners who want to increase their influence and open their aperture to spot holistic, innovation opportunities.

Design Leaders who seek new ways to empower and strategically align their design teams to operate at parity alongside other disciplines.

Senior Level Executives in design adjacent roles (e.g., Product Management, Engineering, Strategy) who also influence the creative process.

Who is this course for ...

What you’ll get out of this course ...

Explore innovation opportunities through new lenses that will open your creative aperture. Develop ways to strengthen your creative influence, and include non-designers by fostering their ability to make creative sparks and connections across diverse insights and inspirations.

A playbook to guide your creative problem-solving as design leaders positioned at parity within multidisciplinary teams

Investigate the paradigms that influence our converging, hyper-connected world and draw inspiration from immersing in diverse resources. These paradigms may include newly emerging technologies, trends and exemplars (e.g., startups, research institutes) to curate and study.

Key frameworks that help you find diverse inputs, insights and inspirations that can help improve your team's future foresight

Understand the key shifts in role clarity, process and enablers necessary to demonstrate design's potential within your organization. Learn how to drive influence by ensuring design's contributions are closely aligned to the goals and critical needs of the business.

A holistic approach to guide your ongoing investment in design capabilities, requiring stakeholder and transition management

Imagine yourself in this opportunity by using our interactive, peer discussions as a mirror to see how you might engage multidisciplinary teams in new ways. Develop ways to lead differently as we exchange hard lessons together. Your voice matters in the work!

Key perspectives on how to evolve your design career in support of reimagining design's potential to unlock meaningful innovation

Meet your peers via our live interactive discussions on Zoom. Learn and build together, share feedback and compare notes with each other. You will be able to tap into your cohort after the course ends. Let's have some fun through every step!

A network of creative peers and leaders to elevate your impact

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Course syllabus

Executive Chairman, Boston Consulting Group

Vice President, Design & Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft

Founder & Lead Executive Director, Dori Tunstall, Inc.

Independent Filmmaker, Helvetica, Objectified, Rams, Eno

What people are saying ...

Meet your instructor ...

Meet your cohort and understand what to expect.

1 Live Welcome Session on June 30th

Get together with Kevin Bethune and your cohort peers for live interactive discussion and sharing of perspectives.

2 Consecutive Live-Sessions on Saturdays

Our second cohort will embark on two live, interactive sessions with asynchronous lesson material and projects before and in between, as well as having resources to continue explorations after the course concludes.

July 5th & 12th, 2025

We'll provide exercises for students to perform their own independent investigations on where design, creativity and/or innovation questions could be applied to their day-to-day realities. They will have opportunities to bring their findings back into the next live session.

Weekly projects

Course schedule

This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects

Active hands-on learning

You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams

Interactive and project-based

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

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About this course

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