Learning Design Thinking: Venture Design

If you’ve ever wondered how you can structure your organization for rapid growth and peak impact, frog launched the course Learning Design Thinking: Venture Design with you in mind.

Venture design is a lean take on human-centered design, optimized for the creation of new businesses—building them rapidly and efficiently from zero to launch. In partnership with LinkedIn Learning, frog has built an online course that helps uncover the advantages that this approach brings to entrepreneurial efforts in both startups and major multinationals. The course has received over 100,000 views and has helped viewers understand how to use the tools of design to help prioritize progress over process in their entrepreneurial efforts.

This intermediate-level course is taught by Ethan Imboden, VP of Creative and Head of Venture Design at frog. Imboden highlights the hallmarks of ventures design as “the accelerated time to market for the new venture, the broad scope of work spanning from foundational strategy through the design of multiple touch points across the product ecosystem, and the choice to launch fast, learn in the wild and iterate forward from there.”

Along with exploring the principles that make up venture design, Imboden’s course taps into the challenges facing entrepreneurs, including designing for impact, defending autonomy, and driving continuous engagement.

What You’ll Learn

This course uses real-world case studies from frog’s work with both early-stage companies and Fortune 500 leaders to outline a framework for understanding where to focus innovation efforts and how to structure these efforts for the highest likelihood of success. The course focuses on the following areas:

1. Design, Entrepreneurship, and the Innovation Imperative: Building any new venture requires designing an organizational structure that facilitates sustained growth. This section covers ways to align innovation within your company’s growth strategy.
2. Independence: This section defines autonomy as a priority to shape best practices. Included are methods to establish and maintain independence within new business and product lines for optimal success.
3. Collaboration: Successful venture design hinges on strong synergy across your organization. Education and technology firm Kidaptive serves as a great example for continuous engagement paired with innovative design to foster strong results and business outcomes.
4. Speed: Prioritizing progress over process is the focus of this section. Leveraging lessons from touch technology startup Sensel, this section covers many of the battles ventures are sure to face down the road and the importance of anticipating those hurdles rather than simply reacting to them.
5. Focus: The final section highlights a need to stay focused on impact. Rather than getting hung up on the next immediate step, this sections provides the tools to help ventures focus on the bigger picture.

Get Started

This course on venture design was made by frog for subscription-based service LinkedIn Learning. If you are not already a member, free month-long trials are available. Simply visit the course Design Thinking: Venture Design to watch previews or find out more details on how you can sign up and start learning today.