Building the wrong thing is expensive. Finding out at launch is worse. This certificate teaches you to test ideas early and often—before you've committed the time, budget, and team—so you can make smarter decisions at every stage of the work.

In Introduction to Human-Centered Prototyping, you'll learn the foundational craft of making your thinking visible by building quick, low-fidelity prototypes that surface real feedback from real people. In From Ideas to Action, you'll learn IDEO's methodology for moving an idea from a hunch to a tested direction through prototyping, experimentation, and iteration. In Prototyping with AI, you'll bring AI into your practice to explore more directions and sharpen your judgment.

The most innovative teams have built a shared instinct to prototype often, test before they commit, and treat feedback as the fastest path to a strong launch. This certificate gives you the hands-on experience and the language to build that culture on your team and to be the person who leads it.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Move an idea from a rough hunch to a tested direction your team can build on within weeks.
• Use AI to explore more prototype directions in less time, without losing the human judgment to decide which directions are worth pursuing.
• Build prototypes that get you the kind of feedback that changes minds, sharpens decisions, and surfaces what's actually worth making.
• Develop a point of view on when, where, and how to bring AI into your prototyping practice and when to leave it out.
• Become the person your team turns to when an idea needs to get out of a deck and become something real.

Learn to surface insights that shift your organization’s perspective and inform the decisions that matter most. In Insights for Innovation, you'll learn how to uncover what people want and need through observation and interviewing, and translate what you hear into a clear direction. In Human-Centered Research with AI, you'll learn how to use AI to hold more complexity without losing the human story, explore patterns across hundreds of data points, sharpen your interpretation, and build recommendations that shape strategy.

Research is no longer just about gathering data. It's about helping your organization decide what to do next. Whether you're a researcher by title or a leader who relies on research to make calls, this program will help you bring rigor, empathy, and AI fluency to the work of turning what you learn into what your team does next.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Lead a research project from blank page to insights your team can act on.
• Use AI to make sense of more qualitative data than you ever could on your own, and still surface a clear human story.
• Get to the why—not just what people say, but what's actually driving what they do.
• Deliver research your team will actually use, instead of a report that gets filed away.
• Become the person leadership turns to to inform the most important business decisions.

Learn to surface insights that shift your organization’s perspective and inform the decisions that matter most. In Insights for Innovation, you'll learn how to uncover what people want and need through observation and interviewing, and translate what you hear into a clear direction. In Human-Centered Research with AI, you'll learn how to use AI to hold more complexity without losing the human story, explore patterns across hundreds of data points, sharpen your interpretation, and build recommendations that shape strategy.

Research is no longer just about gathering data. It's about helping your organization decide what to do next. Whether you're a researcher by title or a leader who relies on research to make calls, this program will help you bring rigor, empathy, and AI fluency to the work of turning what you learn into what your team does next.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Lead a research project from blank page to insights your team can act on.
• Use AI to make sense of more qualitative data than you ever could on your own, and still surface a clear human story.
• Get to the why—not just what people say, but what's actually driving what they do.
• Deliver research your team will actually use, instead of a report that gets filed away.
• Become the person leadership turns to to inform the most important business decisions.

Learn an accessible and actionable process to do the work of innovation, no matter your role or industry. This process helps you imagine new strategic possibilities, quickly and inexpensively test to de-risk these possibilities, and build compelling business cases to grow confidence and consensus.

In this program, you’ll learn how to merge creative thinking with analytical rigor, develop ways to grow influence around your ideas, and get to bold, new products and services faster—all while staying tightly aligned with the needs of your customers and the realities of your business or organization. Whether you work in business, government, education, or nonprofit, this certificate will help you drive and follow through on innovative initiatives.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Learn a process to make strategic choices centered on both the needs of your customers as well as your business or organization.
• Follow repeatable steps to imagine and test strategic initiatives that combine analytical rigor and creativity, and equip you with confidence to move these initiatives forward.
• Gain techniques to quickly develop, test, and iterate parts of a business model (value proposition, revenue model, and channel) to make new programs, products, and services that are grounded in what people really want.
• Apply methods from design thinking (such as brainstorming, prototyping, and iteration) to business modeling and strategy.
• Grow your skills and confidence to undertake, plan, and lead day-to-day strategic efforts, as well as broad wide-scale innovation initiatives.

Advance your design thinking skills and have a greater impact through your work with this action-oriented learning experience. We’ve designed this program to help you move from understanding the core concepts of design thinking to practicing and applying these concepts in different scenarios in order to build your confidence to solve complex problems in the real world. Through extended practice, you’ll improve your ability to apply design thinking to your own work.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Deepen your understanding of when and how to apply design thinking to complex challenges.
• Motivate others to think and work more creatively and collaboratively.
• Apply techniques to help you and your team overcome common barriers to creativity.
• Showcase your new skills through tangible, real-world project challenges, like an insights report and prototypes of products and services.

This human-centered strategy certificate program will give you the tools and mindsets to design a winning strategy and ensure that strategy is actionable for your team and organization. In Designing Strategy, you’ll learn how to identify your strategic options and apply a customer-centric strategy process to help you make winning choices. In Activating Strategy, you’ll learn how to activate those choices by engaging stakeholders within your organization and building the shared understanding, alignment, and conditions teams need to deliver on strategy.

People across an organization make strategic choices every day. No matter where you sit in your organization, this program can help you ensure teams and individuals can move confidently from strategy to action.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Apply the Playing to Win strategy framework, a customer-centric method to create winning outcomes.
• Enable others to take action on strategy by developing clear plans to assess, build, and mobilize your team's resources.
• Translate strategy across functions and teams to achieve common goals and ensure the strategy is actionable and feasible.
• Effectively organize, communicate, and activate strategy.
• Help teams and individuals bring strategy to life through their everyday choices.

Strong communication skills and the ability to influence others are critical in order to have impact at work and beyond. We’ve designed this program for anyone who wants to shape and express their ideas more clearly, craft convincing messages, and share information effectively. You’ll learn to apply mindsets and techniques from human-centered design—like empathy, prototyping, and creativity—in order to communicate in ways that engage, persuade, and shift the way people think, feel, and behave.

You’ll get the most out of this program if you have some experience sharing ideas with others and giving presentations as this program will help you build upon your foundational experience to develop more powerful communication skills.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Learn a process for moving from an idea to a story that motivates and inspires.
• Create a narrative that conveys your idea in a compelling way.
• Take your audience on a meaningful journey and establish a trusted connection.
• Gain techniques for presenting information in memorable ways.
• Practice a variety of presentation methods to better engage your audience.

Leading projects across teams is hard, even harder if you don’t directly manage the teams. How do you break through silos and change the way people work together? How do you unite others around a common goal? How do you lead day-in and day-out to tackle complex strategic work or bring a new idea to life?

In this program, learn to become a collaborative leader—one who’s confident, empathetic, and effective at leading diverse teams. You’ll use the principles of human-centered design to make your leadership actionable and tangible when guiding projects and initiatives.

This program is designed to help you become a more influential leader within your company or organization, no matter where you sit.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Identify and articulate a common goal that brings diverse stakeholders and team members together.
• Lead cross-functional teams through moments of ambiguity, creative thinking, and tactical execution.
• Break through silos and create new ways of working that inspire everyone to be at their best.
• Present project work in ways that compel stakeholders in your organization to see things differently and buy-in.
• Learn and practice leadership skills that take you through the life of a project—from early ideation to execution to presentation—and create sustainable conditions for future work.

Learn a unique approach to leadership that will help you tackle today’s complex challenges by navigating ambiguity, collaborating across diversity, and maintaining momentum with optimism. Leadership today is not about knowing all the answers, but turning uncertain conditions into growth opportunities. We’ve designed this program to help you build the skills and confidence necessary to create the conditions for new kinds of collaboration across a diversity of perspectives.

Certificate Program Outcomes

• Explore and apply unique leadership approaches for different scenarios.
• Create psychological safety and creative space for a team, encouraging a diversity of perspectives.
• Guide teams through the process of experimentation.
• Set the conditions for a culture of creativity and collaboration.
• Showcase your new skills through tangible, real-world project challenges, such as a leadership plan and a story to share.