Team Learning
“Holding a curious mindset is a great starting point when you're leading your team or organization. If you're in a truly new space, you won't always know the answers. Your team won't either. You're going to venture into the unknown together. Curiosity is a great way to lead that charge.”
-Tim Brown, Chair of IDEO DOWNLOAD TEAM LEARNING GUIDE >
Become a More Creative & Collaborative Team
Learn the skills and mindsets of design thinking and build your team's confidence to tackle complex challenges. As a global design company, IDEO has been honing the methods of design thinking and a human-centered approach to business for over 30 years. This approach will inspire and equip your team with the tools necessary for creative problem solving.
Grow your team's problem-solving toolkit with techniques taught by design thinking practitioners like IDEO founder David Kelley and IDEO CEO Tim Brown. Our 90-minute self-paced online classes and in-depth 5-week cohort online courses provide interactive, practical lessons and bite-sized learning you can apply to day-to-day work.
Who Would Benefit
Teams from all roles and industries looking to:
- Add design thinking to their toolkit.
- Create a more collaborative and customer-centric team.
- Become more experimental and unlock their creative potential.
We recommend learning in teams of 4 to 20 individuals.
Why Enroll
- Develop the skills and mindsets to support breakthrough innovation.
- Empower your team to apply practical design thinking methods to daily work.
- Execute bold new ideas by building creative confidence.
- Learn from IDEO practitioners through bite-sized online content that fits into any schedule.
What to Expect
We believe in learning by doing. Building design thinking skills requires practice and pushing outside your comfort zone.
- Learn through engaging video lessons, hands-on activities, sharing insights, and gathering feedback.
- Gain fresh perspective that will expand your thinking and push you to bold new ideas through practice and discussion with your team and community.
- Lead your team through practical learning and create rich collaboration using the Team Learning Guide.
AT A GLANCE
Online Learning Experiences
Certificate Programs
Advance your career and build your confidence with a 2-6 month action-oriented learning experience made up of cohort and self-paced courses.
Cohort Courses
Collaborate with a global community in our 5-week online courses and apply new skills to your day-to-day work to increase your impact.
Self-Paced Courses
Learn anytime, anywhere. Boost your skills with flexible, short-form online courses designed to fit your life. Access 90 days from purchase.
How to Enroll as a Team
1. CHOOSE YOUR LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Learn anytime, anywhere. Boost your team’s skills with short-form online courses. Your team will have the flexibility to complete the lessons on your own schedule within the 90-day access window. Expect your team to spend 2-10 hours total.
Collaborate with a global community in our 5-week cohort courses. Great for deeper learning, building communication and collaboration, and encouraging remote employees to connect. Plan to set aside 4-5 hours per week for coursework.
Advance your career, gain relevant skills, and build your confidence with a 3-6 month action-oriented learning experience. Certificate programs are designed to deepen your learning and broaden your professional impact.
View all courses2. SELECT A DATE
For self-paced courses, you’ll have access to the content for 90 days from your date of purchase. For cohort courses and certificate programs, see the course calendar for start and end dates.
3. PAY AND ENROLL
Enrolling your team is easy. Just follow these quick steps.
- Choose your course and click enroll.
- On the checkout page, change the quantity to the number of people on your team.
- Click the box beside the course that says “Purchasing for someone else”.
- Once you check out, login at ideou.com/account to create an account and add your team’s names and email addresses to the course. Each individual will get email instructions to start their course. For more detail, see this guide with visuals.
FAQ
There are two distinct ways to learn at IDEO U—cohort courses and self-paced. Each has a different structure and schedule:
Cohort courses
Cohort courses run on a set calendar, with fixed start and end dates. Course learning is self-paced within those dates and requires approximately 4-5 hours per week over 5 weeks. Courses consist of videos, activities, assignments, access to course teaching team, and feedback from a global community of learners.
Cohort courses also provide optional 1-hour video Community Conversations, held weekly by the teaching team. They occur during set times, which are released during the first week of the course, and are set to accommodate as many time zones as possible.
Self-paced courses
Self-paced courses take between 2-10 hours to complete. We provide 90 days of access from the date of purchase, so you may spread your learning over multiple weeks, or refer back to it multiple times during your access period. Courses consist of a series of videos, activities, and small assignments.
All of our courses are fully online and self-paced, so you can take them from any time zone, anywhere in the world.
During 5-week cohort courses, your course teaching team will host scheduled virtual community conversations which are optional. Timing will be announced during the first week of the course and is set to accommodate as many time zones as possible. These conversations are optional, so don’t worry if you can’t make them.
The best place for most people to start at IDEO U is our Foundations in Design Thinking Certificate program. This program includes 2 cohort courses that will enable you to gain a foundational and practical understanding of essential design thinking skills and empower you to create innovative, human-centered solutions.
That said, choosing the right course really comes down to your learning goals. It can be helpful to think about which course topics align with the problems you’re trying to solve. You can find more details on our different course topics here.
While you can enroll in multiple courses concurrently, we strongly advise that you do so only if you are able to commit to a minimum of 5 hrs/week for each course (i.e. 10 hrs/week for 2 courses) to ensure the most valuable learning experience. If that does not feel feasible, we recommend taking the courses separately and exploring future dates on our course calendar.
We currently do not offer private or customized courses. We do provide additional resources that can help teams be successful while taking a course together:
1. Team Learning Guide: A best practice guide for facilitating offline discussions to complement the in-course experience.
2. Manage Learners function: A portal where you can track your team's course progress.
3. Private Learning Circle: A closed space for discussion on the learning platform specifically for your team.
IDEO U does not offer workshops. Our preferred partner is Experience Point who offers half-day to 2-day facilitated innovation workshops. If you’re interested, please reach out to hello@ideou.com and and we'd be happy to connect you to the right person at Experience Point.
Yes. Purchasing a seat for your team member is a quick and simple process. When you’re on the check-out page, click the box beside the course that says “Purchasing for someone else”. Once you complete the purchase, you’ll be able to enroll the learner by clicking on the “enroll learner” button in the confirmation email. Visit our FAQ page for the step-by-step process.
You can purchase a course on our website using a credit card, PayPal, or Shop Pay. We also offer installment plans which you can select at checkout if you use the Shop Pay method of payment.
We typically are not able to accommodate bank transfer or invoicing, however, if your order includes 25 seats or more, please contact hello@ideou.com and our team will be happy to review your request.
We offer a discount when you enroll in multiple courses at the same time through some of our certificate programs, including Foundations in Design Thinking, Business Innovation, Human-Centered Strategy, and Communicating for Impact.
Foster Innovation from within
Rally your team around important challenges and build momentum towards tangible results with IDEO U Sprints!
Learn from Experts
Learn from IDEO U instructors who have spent years practicing and honing the skills of design thinking and creative leadership. From diverse disciplines, including the Toy Lab and IDEO's Design for Change studio, our instructors are experienced practitioners of the methods and mindsets that lead to more creative and collaborative teams and organizations. No matter what IDEO U classes and courses your team embarks on, our instructors will generously share the knowledge and skills they use to create positive impact through design across the world and across industries.
