University of Notre Dame SAP Next-Gen Chapter for Design Innovation Event

[don_ginocchio]

On Tuesday January 22^nd, the University of Notre Dame SAP Next-Gen Chapter for Design Innovation held an event for students, entrepreneurs and business professionals entitled Design- Led Development of your Business or Product Idea. The event was targeted at teams competing in the McCloskey New Venture Competition but was open to the local business community and entrepreneurs as well. I was pleased to be joined but two of Notre Dame’s distinguished faculty in leading the event.

• Wendy Angst: Associate Teaching Professor and Assistant Department Chair in the Management & Organization, Mendoza College of Business


• Scott Shim: Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Notre Dame

The session was described as follows: Design-Led Development puts the user first by truly understanding their needs before implementing a solution. Investing time in user research and design at the beginning of the product life cycle helps to ensure we are creating solutions users will want to use. Join us for this workshop to learn specific user research, synthesis and ideation techniques to improve the quality of your design. We will also share insights on how to build the design-driven team for your startup enterprise.

The faculty provided a deep dive on ethnographic techniques for building empathy as well as the rapid iteration characteristics of Design Thinking that provide entrepreneurs with agile solutions. The SAP portion of the agenda featured an overview of SAP’s BUILD and its considerable resources for creating solutions that users will love. In addition we covered additional assets and learning resources available through SAP Design and openSAP. The goal was to inspire participants to apply the principles of Design Thinking to their projects and new venture endeavors.

This event was another in a series of Next-Gen Chapter activities that highlight SAP’s collaboration with Notre Dame as announced in October 2018: University of Notre Dame Opens SAP Next-Gen Chapter to Spread the Principles of Design Thinking. Another industry boot camp on design innovation is planned for April 10, 2019.