Welcome to this course, Design Strategy. My name is Eric Knight and I'm a strategy professor at the University of Sydney Business School. One of the most exciting things in my job is to see what my students do after they leave. And so, I welcome you to this particular journey in design strategy, and hope that you find through this course something that allows you to realize your potential and interest in business. This course has been created and administered by the University of Sydney Business School. And it explores the foundations of our particular approach to corporate strategy and design thinking which we call Design Strategy. Over the next few weeks you'll learn about the design strategy framework and complete a series of practical exercises that can show you how to apply the principles of design strategy to your own organizations. Now, those organizations might be a startup, it may be a small business, it may even be a large organization that you are either working or go onto work in. In each of these cases, design strategy can be relevant to you. This course is comprised of five modules of study. Module one will give you an overview of the whole concept of design strategy and design thinking. Module two will introduce you to the concepts of primary market research and how you craft a meaningful problem statement in the context of a company strategy. Module three will introduce you to the concept of prototyping and how you iterate a prototype to eventually get to product market fit. Module four will provide two practical case studies and demonstrate how two leading companies are using design strategy to innovate and solve problems in their everyday business. In module five we will explore what this course has meant for you and how you can use Design Strategy to realize your own vision for your business or for that which you work in. This course will be led by my close colleague Dr. Carla Harris. She will help you learn about design strategy and it's foundations in design thinking which has come from manufacturing, but is now a meaningful and effective problem solving tool across a range of different sectors. Thanks Eric. It's my pleasure to be able to take you through this course, because it's a subject that I'm really passionate about. Design strategy has had a huge influence on my career as an executive, as well as my pathway into entrepreneurship. Not only did design strategy and the tools that sit behind it design thinking, helped me identify and refine the idea behind my startup Longevity App, I also use these methodologies across nearly every function of my business. From customer research to product feature selection through to establishing corporate distribution channels, Design thinking has a vital role. More importantly, using these techniques when creating and executing against the company's strategy means that the company's strategy is embedded right throughout the organization and its stakeholders. And that's what design strategy is all about. So, it doesn't matter whether you're a female entrepreneur, a middle manager for a listed entity, or a small business owner in rural Australia, design strategy will be helpful for you. Our hope in this course is to introduce you to more than just theory. We'd like to provide you with practical insights that you can use as a manager, or as an entrepreneur, today or into the future to allow you to better enhance the speed and effectiveness of your decision making. We will draw on in-depth interviews where you'll learn about design strategy from practice. We're going to draw on two leading companies, a digital bank, UBank, and a global re-insurance giant Swiss Re. You'll also hear from two recent University of Sydney MBA graduates who share their experience of design strategy with you, and how it's allowed them to shift their own problem solving mindset. I hope you enjoy this course.