Business for Responsible Futures: Strategic Branding

Technology is now influencing our lives at a level that is unprecedented. Many problems have emerged with the rise of new media and frontier technologies, from effects on our individual mental health, manipulative product recommendations, social influence on individual beliefs, to unethical use of generative AI-based chatbots to unknowingly abuse copyright of other digital artists’ original contents. This course asks students to consider strategic foresights for our evolving society and businesses, and identify underlying causes in myriad of wicked problems our society is facing. In this highly interactive class, we will be exploring how to predict and invent the future where interactions between individuals can happen via real self as well as via digital representation in the online world. Our goal will be to design responsible businesses that can build customer and employee trust and give power back to people and nature.

Traditionally, customer discovery centers on individual user experience. In this class, we are looking at the ways in which user experience can help us identify the problems in which participant behavior, culture, and complex systems of platform, content, services, are the medium of solution design. In this experiential class, students are encouraged to explore how we interact with these systems on the psychological and social level.

This class will ask students to build multi-disciplinary teams from all fields to collaborate and develop a new business from the ground-up by applying a super-interdisciplinary design approach to see through wicked problems and come up with innovative solutions. How might we reimagine an online grocery shopping experience that appeals to our better natures than Amazon or Instacart does today? How might we design a stock trading product like Robinhood that avoids the mass purchase of worthless stock? Working under the guidance of coaches and entrepreneurs, student teams will choose a project topic that falls in the broad set of issues so that they can leverage their journey into an industry area of their interest — topics may include Alternate Food, Climate and Energy Resilience, Avatars and Culture Connecting the Metaverse and Reality, The Future of Beauty, Alternative to Fast Fashion, Consumer Intelligence, New Ecosystems and Fintech, and the Future of Congestion Pricing. Students will invent novel solution concepts that leverage tech and prototype solutions and explore customer value propositions and business models, all while gaining fluency in the behavioral and cultural principles that might shed light on how these tools can be applied to the work of responsible innovation. Our class will culminate with a series of fast pitches to industry executives to present the startups students worked on during the program.

To successfully participate in this remote offering, students need a computer and high-speed internet access that allows video streaming. Students are expected to participate in 3 1/2 hours of synchronous instructional activities (scheduled on Zoom Meeting) each week. In addition, students enrolled at 8 credits should expect 4 hours per week of asynchronous learning activities, including group work. Students enrolled at 12 credits should expect 8 hours per week of asynchronous learning activities, including group work.

Spring Anticipated Credit Equivalencies

Enrolling at 4 credits:

4 - Foundations of Business Design 

Enrolling at 8 credits:

4 - Foundations of Business Design

4 - Responsible Innovation Ventures Capstone

Enrolling at 12 credits:

4 - Foundations of Business Design

4 - Responsible Innovation Ventures Capstone

4 - Imagining customers' possible futures: A Design x Foresight approach