Today’s global business environment is complex and ever-changing. Change is now a constant and driving change can be a difficult leadership task. This course is designed to help leaders proactively lead change. Students in this course will learn strategies to effectively assess potential drivers of change, facilitate the implementation of change, and become a change agent in an organization by propelling momentum toward positive results. Students will practice skills to move ideas toward results, combat organizational and employee complacency, and overcome resistance to change.

This course examines the concepts of consumer behavior in the marketplace. Behavioral aspects of the marketing process from manufacturer to consumer are considered. Consumers’ actions during the search, purchase, use, and evaluation of products and services to fulfill needs are explored. This course illuminates how marketers can use the concepts of consumer behavior to influence individuals’ purchases of products and services.

Organizations and businesses face a changing social landscape in which their products and services are inextricably linked with the needs of the people who create and consume those products and services. Stakeholders looking to innovate and seize opportunity, or needing creative solutions to challenges, must thoughtfully integrate knowledge and tools from different disciplines to strike a balance between what is feasible from the organizational perspective and what is needed from the consumer perspective. For stakeholders facing multifaceted challenges, design thinking is an important process and tool that supports creative innovation and user-focused solutions. Students in this course will become familiar with design thinking as an approach and tool, learning how to apply it to their professional and personal goals.

Design thinking is an approach that helps bridge organizational needs and consumer needs, with deep focus on consumer-driven data that informs innovation and practice. Students learn how to apply design thinking principles through work on case studies as well as application to an issue in their field of study or career. This course focuses on building mixed methods research skills like participant observation, focus groups, interviews, and surveys - to create and test data-informed solutions, and report findings to organizational stakeholders. (Prerequisite: SOCI530)

This course focuses on an applied project related to the student’s major field of study or career path. Integrating knowledge and skills from the other courses in the design thinking graduate certificate will be critical in this course. Students will identify a multi-faceted problem or challenge that they want to address from a design thinking perspective, collect and evaluate stakeholder insights and data, and then design and assess multiple solutions. (Prerequisite: SOCI531)