Whether you are trying to understand how to pitch, plan, navigate customers, manage stakeholders, close on agreements or close on a funding round, human-centered design for all related tasks and goals can get you to the next milestone and using capital wisely. Come to better understand what your audience needs to see and hear about your product, plan and potential.

Learn from a firm that combines decades of experience with technology transfer (and understands your world), with the university research and founder experience, PLUS investing, product development, being involved with start-up teams and their boards. Design Thinking can help avoid common pitfalls including the pitfall of using what appears to be Design Thinking tools like Lean Canvas without having done the work behind a business plan presented. In other words, don’t be caught with what looks like a product of a Design Thinking process without having gone through that process. Learn about the related concepts of Venture Design.

Are you asking the right questions and testing your assumptions going into facilities modifications, new practices or new digital solutions? Learn how a Design Thinking discipline that works alongside building or new implementation processes can be brought in-house. We take a “train the trainer” approach to help all involved on all levels work with the principles, for better outcomes. Sometimes one workshop is all it takes. Our workshops are never a sales pitch for long, dependency-rich consulting agreements!

Are you involved with invention development and refinement? Start-up acceleration and incubation? Translational medicine? Human-centered Design Thinking can help at these stages. Workshops oriented to this space focus on understanding that any product can have a complex set of users to consider. In fact, in healthcare, there may not even be a singular customer for an invention. The customer may be payor, provider, patient, or all simultaneously. A discipline of considering what everyone needs out of a product that will touch their life, their time or their business bottom line - and having that feed back into the design or optimization or formulation refinement - pays off.

You are expert on design for form and function. Maybe what you create is also beautiful. If humans use them, will they use them as imagined? How can a Design Thinking discipline help challenge assumptions so that what is imagined is more predictive or helps feed back into design refinement? A workshop geared to your area may help. Using a “train the trainer” philosophy, we want this to be time and cost effective. A workshop is a great place to start.

Hey, shops and restaurants! We have offerings for you, too. Venture Design thinks about all of the human users of your new venture, be they staff or customers. This agile approach of Venture Design allows you to test your ideas, combining Design Thinking and entrepreneurship. Testing ideas can be both fun and a little scary. We can walk you through how to protect your brand and ideas while adopting the modes of Design Thinking to test your assumptions. A workshop can also address how to establish a positive business culture with these principles, so that you have the best chance of attracting and retaining a great team.

Do you need something like Venture Design 101? Perhaps you don’t have an institutional support framework and technology transfer office to help you navigate invention management and start-up creation. A workshop tailored to what we glean from the initial information you provide us on intake can result in a workshop that is part presentation and part short advising session, to send you on your way with next steps. Through the Design Thinking framework, we can help you understand how to think about building value from day one, such as to craft good patent claims while you work with a patent attorney. When needed, for this kind of workshop program, we offer IP-related non-disclosure agreement as assurance so that we can work beyond hypotheticals.