Client based in

Portland, OR, USA

Industry

Master Education

Scope of Work

Ideation

Business Challenge

During its 18-month immersion, the 40-strong UofO Sports Product Management (SPM) cohort learns the skills required to develop and bring to market innovative sports & outdoor apparel, footwear & equipment. The cohort is divided into teams of 5 who start & finish the program together, through the whole life cycle, from Insights to creation to launch. The SPM Master’s program, which had been successfully running for a couple of years, came to me in the summer of 2019 with a challenge: whilst all teams were asked to gather insights & come up with a great product idea to prototype; they were never actually taught how to ideate! Could I put together a simple module to help them?

Deliverables

In this highly practical teaching module, students are introduced to & coached in the practice of ideation techniques. From the refinement of their design challenge, to the supervised application of divergent & convergent thinking, they are taught how to harness the power of their team to ultimately land the product idea that they will be prototyping.

3i focus

Insights & Ideas.

I’ve been partnering closely with the other teachers since 2019 under the Design Thinking process to deliver a module that helps students turn insights into ideas. Using a combination of Zoom & Miro whiteboard platforms, I’ve now run this 10hr-module both in-person & online.

Results

Since Fall 2020, I’ve been teaching more than 200 master students in the techniques of ideation. Some of the teams have actually come onto successfully launch their