• Understand context, functions, processes in a business and industrial environment and the impact of those factors on business performance
• Design solutions applying a scientific and engineering approach (Analysis, Learning, Reasoning, and Modeling capability deriving from a solid and rigorous multidisciplinary background) to face problems and opportunities in a business and industrial environment
• Interact in a professional, responsible, effective and constructive way in a working environment, also motivating group members

Expected Learning Outcomes

• Understand context, functions, processes in a business and industrial environment and the impact of those factors on business performance
  • Extrapolate the business needs from a specific situation/context and summarize a list of requirements to be matched in order to fulfill those needs
• Design solutions applying a scientific and engineering approach (Analysis, Learning, Reasoning, and Modeling capability deriving from a solid and rigorous multidisciplinary background) to face problems and opportunities in a business and industrial environment
  • Generate and develop an innovation proposal impacting the business and, at the same time, identify the related business and organizational transformations needed to implement the innovation. Finally integrate both plans to achieve both business innovation and transformation
• Interact in a professional, responsible, effective and constructive way in a working environment, also motivating group members
  • Drive the team work  in a professional environment interacting both with team mates and professors, and with professionals in the companies providing the brief

What does it mean to re-design and transform a business? How can we move from a vision to an actioned new purposeful organization?

Introducing an innovation (like a new product or service) is difficult but still more straightforward than transforming a business. 

Changing the very nature of a company goes beyond designing and manufacturing new products and/or developing and delivering new services. 

An automotive company wanting to enter the mobility arena with car-sharing;

a postal company introducing financial branch;

or a software company wanting to develop strategic consultancy skills to help its customers correctly assess the business value of the technological solutions they provide,

are possible examples of what we mean by Business Transformations. 

These transformations are difficult to be conceived. They require to have a vision, to scout the human and social mega-trends, to interpret the changes in users’ behaviors, and to create new solutions.

Besides that, though, they will also challenge the way people work inside the company. If you want to do radically different things, you must be different yourself. People in the organization must change their skills but also their mindsets. This human transformation is hard-wired into the business re-design and transformation, and no business transformation can survive without helping people in the company to transform themselves.

 The Lab leverages the rules of project-based learning. It will provide a business (re)design and transformation experience, proposing a business transformation live experience. It will be developed either with the innovation and transformation department of corporations or with consulting companies helping corporations to achieve a major business transformation and to make it really happen. 

The knowledge acquired in previous courses regarding strategy, design thinking, vision and change, leadership, etc. will be seamlessly integrated into a single effective and agile process.

Students will work in teams to design the answers to the brief proposed by companies. The project development will require to interact with the managers in the real field through interviews and project review meetings. Each team will design and develop a workshop with external stakeholders to either investigate the customers’ needs, validate the proposed solution, or trigger the transformation, helping people move towards the new direction.

Finally, teams will also co-operate to design the overall experience collaborating with the professors to share methodologies and tools already used in previous courses but possibly not known by part of the team members.

There are not binding pre-requisites to attend the Lab.

Basics of strategy, Innovation, Design and Leadership will be useful for developing the project.

The course final evaluation is made up of three mandatory components:

1. Group Project evaluation
2. Company evaluation
3. Individual evaluation (based on the contribution to the course community beyond the project team)