Methods & Tools for Product Innovation Online Certificate
With any great innovation, it’s the people behind the product that drive it. Our Methods & Tools for Product Innovation Certificate trains you to identify promising opportunities and to develop insightful solutions, integrating business, design and engineering principles.
Next Offered: Summer 2025
By leading interviews and employing powerful research methods, you’ll learn by doing, unearthing the problems your product seeks to solve. You’ll learn how to gather data to explore new possibilities, transform unstructured data into meaningful insights via analysis tools, and ensure that human experience is always at the heart of what you create. Go from blank slate to prototypes in a matter of weeks.
The certificate may be completed conveniently online in as little as one semester.
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What Will You Gain?
You will use project-based learning to gain the skills needed to move from ideas and concepts to product completion. Data-driven decision-making is a vital part of the process, and you will utilize ethnographic techniques to identify opportunities that appeal to potential users. The certificate also emphasizes visual communication techniques that push ideas forward.
You'll gain:
- Ability to leverage an innovation process, starting with white space and finishing with an innovative product concept
- Methods to gain specific insights into human needs, the foundation of any product/service opportunity
- Tools to analyze unstructured data to discover insights relevant for new products
Curriculum Details
The Methods & Tools for Product Innovation certificate is divided into two courses. The first course is organized around a general product innovation process: identifying, understanding, and conceptualizing a product opportunity. The second course will cover methods of user research, including one-on-one interviewing and ethnographic techniques.
Course 1: 49-604, Innovation Processes & Tools
Course 2: 49-605, User Experience Research for Digital and Physical Products
Am I a Good Fit?
The iii's online coursework attracts career-minded individuals who are looking for a flexible learning structure that allows them to go to school and continue working full time.
Highly qualified candidates demonstrate a passion for product & service development, innovation, and/or entrepreneurship and have the following background. Sound like you? Learn more about the admissions process.