Creative Leadership is not just a leadership strategy or style. It’s a transformational process that enables individuals and organisations to access, develop and realise their innate creativity and leadership potential.  

In this talk, Rama Gheerawo, Director of The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, will share his insights on design, creativity, and leadership, accumulated over the last 20 years from 300+ projects, executive education and innovation workshops delivered to business, government and communities across the globe.

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“Changing our leadership mindset from outdated models of yesteryear to become visionary, empathic and effective, will be one of the most challenging, yet transformational achievements of this century. Create better leadership at every level, and you create better decisions at every level.”

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Key words: Design / Creativity / Leadership / Innovation / Empathic leadership / Personal & Organisational Transformation / Global / People-centred / Design Thinking / Design Doing

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Rama will be facilitating "The Insider’s Guide to Innovation: the Five Design Thinking Tools you Really Need" workshop with Ivelina Gadjeva

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Service design is a young, but fast-growing design discipline. The services provided by organizations to consumers - as well as those provided by employers in the public sector, healthcare and nonprofits - are getting more and more complex. This complexity is being driven by the possibilities offered by new technologies, and also by consumer demand and the forces of competition.

 

The work of service designers is changing as well, as they are becoming required to learn new skills, and tackle new challenges.

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In this talk, Jesse will identify and discuss a series of trends he sees in today’s world of service design. His role as a practicing service designer, as well as the international perspective he brings through his leadership of the Service Design Network, and being Editor-in-Chief of the SDN journal “Touchpoint”, gives him a unique global perspective which he looks forward to sharing with the audience.

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Key words: trends / service design / transformation / innovation

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Jesse will be facilitating "Service Design for Innovation" workshop

In their talk “Design Thinking – Beyond the Process” Caroline and Selina will share their insights about underlying principles of Design Thinking.

 

A common view on Design Thinking focusses a lot on the process and the steps, but it is more than that.  

 

They highlight their insights by showing examples ranging from the recent example of setting up a

D-School in Santiago de Chile to how larger cooperations are using and setting up Design Thinking.

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Key words: human-centered / industrial application / design thinking principles / mindset / academic

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Selina and Caroline will be facilitating "Experiencing Design Thinking Beyond the Process" workshop

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The list of excuses to avoid innovation is long. Your current business is doing well, your people are so busy running business as is, your portfolio of products/services does not look bad going against competition, budget is tight and there is little room for experiments, etc. etc. etc.

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You need to learn how to identify the main barriers preventing innovation to flourish in your company – in our projects around the world we have identified 10 strong barriers and what works to break them – being able to overcome them is a huge step towards transforming your business.

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Key words: innovation/ overcoming barriers / design thinking

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Pedro will be facilitating "From Trends to Ideas" workshop

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Large organisations are struggling to make the right decisions for their clients and employees.

 

Implementing service design thinking and doing into these organisations can help them in this process. But how to start and what barriers do we encounter.

 

I would love to share some real insight stories on successes and struggles we went through. And give some examples of how we help organisations in this process. Large governmental organisations, like the Flemish institution for education (Gemeenschapsonderwijs), the Flemish department for work and social economy, Belgian department for employment and education VDAB, etc.

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Key words: human-centered / service design / scaling design thinking

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Stina will be facilitating "Stakeholder Mapping and Beyond" workshop

Design Thinking is not just a method or a set of tools. It is one of the strongest signs of organizational evolution on the road to new forms of human collaboration.

 

Which wicked problems in organization does Design Thinking help to solve? What opportunities and in which areas it helps teams to be more effective and achieve results unachievable all the other ways?

 

A 20-minutes talk on the essence of design thinking and its practical implications.

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Key words: design thinking / human-centered / organizational design / future of work

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Maria will be facilitating "Playing the Future: creating products and services based on future trends" workshop

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It's no secret that a growing number of businesses see the great potential of service design. So now is a great time to start your career as a service designer.

 

But if you don't have a proven track record or formal education it can be really challenging to actually get hired.

 

In this presentation Marc will show what you need to do to get your career as a service designer off to a flying start. No matter if you're coming from UX, marketing or just fresh out of university.

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Key words: career development / portfolio / professional transformation / UX

All of us (designers), would prefer to tackle complex and not so complex tasks backed up with research. Ideally we get to talk to users, gather data, interpret and turn it into information and knowledge. In reality, often, we are “user contact deprived”. What do we do then?

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Key words: user research / UX/ customer insights

In this talk I will share my story about DoorMeal and how we used social media as our only marketing channel with a budget of €0. We changed the way of thinking about food delivery and healthy food. Therefore, we created a community and were always two steps ahead of every trend on food and health.

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Key words: Innovation/ food/ healthy food/ food box/ food delivery/ online community/ social media/ followers/ influencer marketing/ marketing

Service and Experience Design are rapidly gaining traction across corporate and government sectors in developed service economies. But you already know this.

Iva’s talk will venture out to new territories.

Join Iva for a lively session on the importance of curated experiences in sport. She will explore design as a tool to get people into sports, to shift mindsets and to address deeply routed gender conditioning.

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Key words: human-centered / design strategy / design in sport / customer insight / design research / design implementation

At her lecture: "Adaptive learning as 21st Century activism" Zahra will share her insights into the learning habits and practices we need to embody - and design for - if we’re to adapt and respond to change that won’t wait for us.

 

As Co-Founder and Director of social enterprise Enrol Yourself, Zahra’s work is all about reinventing lifelong learning to better serve us in the 21st Century. If you’re thinking this talk will be about skills gaps and employers, think again. Zahra will make the case that by bringing learning closer to the fundamental purpose of our lives we might quietly underpin bigger changes we wish to see.  She will share her story: and a set of strategies that you can take back into your life and work.

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Key words: learning design / learner experience design / social design / social technology / lifelong learning / activism / 21st Century / future skills / purpose / transition

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Zahra will be facilitating "Grow to meet a challenge: designing your own curriculum" workshop

As an innovation coach at ING's PACE accelerator track Kevin has lead several cross-functional teams across different geographies through the process of innovation following an approach that marries design thinking, lean startup and agile scrum.

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Kevin will share his experience about the application of lean startup into corporate environment, how Lean Startup and Service Design could be combined and what is business design thinking.

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You will hear a lot of examples from the market that prove that this might be the new way of working!

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Key words: lean startup / service design / innovation methodologies 

For the last decade, Design Thinking offered the world of business a whole new approach to creativity and innovation. There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this innovative field. Too many companies were in love with the process-driven concepts of Design Thinking, turning it sometimes into a quasi-religious by-the-book methodology, whilst forgetting the core concepts of customer-centricity and agile innovation, delivering, at best, meagre incremental change.

 

Why is that? In this talk, Mohamed will share his hands-on insights on the main pitfalls that can break your Design Thinking initiative

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Key words: agile / mindset / transformation / innovation

Consumers are in control; their expectations are high and more complex than ever to satisfy. Join Jason on his path to Personalisation and gain insight into why organisations large and small are investing significant resources to bring Technology and Design Thinking together to tackle multi-million-dollar challenges. 

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Key words: mobile conversion / artificial Intelligence / customer experience / transformation / innovation

How can AI boost your design thinking process? Deyan will delve into the applications of AI-powered, automated sentiment analysis and share of voice tools in reinforcing the empathy and persona definition stages of product and service design through Big Data.

 

Running you through the initial crawling to the final knowledge extraction stages, he will shed light on how machine outputs can be put to work towards highly specific business needs and market demands.

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Key words: AI / empathy / service design / machine learning