Friday workshop learning for your employee teams integrate continuous and applied learning very well.  Your staff will apply methods on your company opportunities and problems making an impact on your business while developing these new knowledge, skills and behaviors for future independent application.

We provide a timely response to engaging with you and your teams on design issues during the design stage, or implementation stage.  Often these issues show up during the making processes, and coaching you through a timely assessment of root cause and effective re-design can save time and money and mitigate further risks down the road.

Learning to apply effective discovery skills while finding impactful needs that are hidden and latent in your organizational contexts is a powerful skill.  We have coached students and employee teams to generate high quality opportunities that can be addressed using creative design methods.  Employees retain these skills and become constantly a-tuned to seeing and documenting new needs as part of their specific employment roles.

Bringing new perspectives and an objective assessment of your design review processes can save significantly on costs, time to implement and mitigate risks.  We can plan and conduct your reviews using proven methods and assessment tools.

We meet weekly or twice weekly with your employee teams in a studio format to coach them through finding, defining and solving tough complex problems your organization is facing.  At the same time your employees learn new design skills, and learn the importance of reflective practice as a learning strategy for future self learning and improvement.

Coop interns are a great resource for any company but are only available for a determined time period. We have successfully coached students for one hour each week to help find opportunities for improvement in your organization whether as part of their full time role or as part of their requirement to undertake a project that they can report on for their academic requirements.  The opportunities they find can often be used as their capstone design experience with the company acting as a supporting partner. We can provide an independent assessment of their design, knowledge application, management and communication  abilities for your future use.

The most critical sub-process of innovation is the design process.  This is where the crux of the problem you are trying to solve is defined and where the creative step for providing novel, appropriate and practical solutions happens.  We can assess your current processes and offer new perspectives on improving them.

The key principles and methods of design can be effectively applied to any business process including the process of managing things.  We use the cognitive strategy of abstraction and systems thinking to help your teams map out existing processes and imagine and implement new more efficient and effective ways of working.

Depending on your educational needs, we can work with you to design a half-day, one day or multiple day off-site workshop to address specific learning objectives for your teams related to design or designing.  This may include weekly end-of-week courses on Friday afternoons to engage your employees and students in design methods application to current problems and engaging in reflective practice for employee and organizational learning.

Architecture and Industrial Design professions place design at the core of their programs, The engineering profession continues to struggle to bring design from the periphery back into the core after years of emphasizing technical rationality, as opposed to professional formation through the learning and doing of design.  We offer program assessment, design and accreditation consulting for design education in engineering programs.

We have experience managing tough design projects and being able to bring them to successful completion.  Let us work with your teams on your toughest most complex design projects and close them by providing a useful case study to be available for future training.

We have provided advice to the Canadian Government on Canada's Innovation policy with respect to Design.  Design is a critical sub-process of innovation and as such deserves dedicated funding and a place as a discipline of inquiry at our research institutes and universities.  We have proposed the establishment of a dedicated funding council bridging across the silos of the existing Tri-council structure and dedicated to the scientific inquiry of design in all of its many forms.

The use of cases developed from your own company experiences can be an effective way to capture lessons-learned and to share them internally to new hires, or as a learning development tool for existing employees.  We can write cases and deliver them to your teams, or to candidates you are planning to interview.