The Company Perspective
Your company on a Rocket 
to tomorrow!
Intro
The Corporate Perspective
Welcome to the Service Design Thinking Program of Opportunities!
Collaborating with top students and academics from leading universities on your innovation challenge, learning what human-centric innovation really means and how it works, having access to hand-picked young talents, gaining insights into latest technology trends and networking with like-minded peers from a broad spectrum of industries – this is what the Service Design Thinking Program at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is about. The program takes place in collaboration with many top notch universities that form the SUGAR Network.
Philosophy
Our Focus
Learn Design Thinking
Leverage Student Creativity
Transform your Organisation
Benefits
What you take away
You can probably guess that the SUGAR program, and thus the SDT program, require more funding than the usual course at a university. This funding is provided by the corporate partners. In other words, the companies sponsor the SDT program. So, why would a company do this?
- Outside the box solutions: The project teams work with high commitment, an outside perspective and methodological guidance for a fairly long time on their innovation challenges. In general, this leads to solutions that differ quite a bit from solutions resulting from internal innovation projects.
- Qualitative Market Data: You learn the Design Thinking approach which is in strong demand in the industry: Qualitative Market Data. Throughout the project, the teams engage in intensive need finding, persona building and challenge redefinition. This data is very interesting to the sponsoring companies.
- Methodological Knowledge: By working closely with the teams and the lecturers of the program, the companies gain a solid understanding of human-centric innovation. Design Thinking is not about sticking PostIts to the wall in Workshops. It is about deeply understanding humans, their needs, preferences and behavior and creating solutions that address these needs and preferences and fit to the behavior.
- Recruiting Opportunities: Get an advantage over competitors by working closely together with master students handpicked from renowned universities and get an exclusive chance to hire them first.
- Great Networking: The SUGAR community with its students, academics and many corporate partners provide an amazing opportunity to network with interesting, influential and like-minded people from different organizations and backgrounds. All events in the program are designed to facilitate this.
- Spirit: Our company partners keep telling us that the SDT/SUGAR program and the community around it carry a certain entrepreneurial spirit they perceive as vitalizing for their organizations.
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT How We Work?
Check out the
The SDT Program
sdt program
The Cornerstones
The Service Design Thinking program run by the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) is a 9-months, „hands-on“ class where international top students work in small teams to develop disruptive innovations by applying the human-centric innovation approach Design Thinking.
The participating students visit lectures on human-centric design and innovation and apply what they have learned to real innovation challenges provided by major companies.
Team
Team Setup
In the SDT program, international student teams work on corporate innovation challenges. Each team is composed of 3-4 KIT students and 3-4 students from a SUGAR partner university (e.g. University of St. Gallen, Linköping University, Trinity College Dublin). The two sub-teams work together remotely using digital collaboration tools most of the time. However, sporadic mutual team visits are encouraged and at the discretion of the students. The team also closely collaborates with three parties, the corporate partner as well as the two lecturing teams of their respective universities.
sdt program
Working with your team
Staying in touch with your team: On the corporate side, the team regularly interacts with a project liaison on an operational level. In addition, a project sponsor is involved when major decisions need to be taken and during milestone checkpoints. Also the corporate liaison and sponsor regularly check-in with the teaching teams of the two universities in order to align on direction.
Documentation: On a monthly level, the teams send a one-pager to the corporate partner summarizing the latest steps. Roughly at the time of the milestone presentations (December, March, June) the partner companies receive a project documentation.
Want to know more about THE SUGAR NETWORK?
Check out the
timeline
Important Dates
- April - July | Prior to Kickoff: Parties agree on collaboration, identify appropriate innovation challenge and choose SUGAR partner university
- Mid September | Warm Up Phase: Kick-Off with teams in Karlsruhe, Learn Design Thinking Basics, Team Building Excercises
- Beginning of October | Project Start: Official International SUGAR Kick-Off with all teams, universities and liaisons
- Mid December | Fall Presentation: Teams present their first preliminary results including challenge understanding and a first prototype
- Beginning of March | Winter Presentation: Teams present various ideas and prototypes to gain feedback. Corporate guests see a wide variety of other teams, challenges and prototypes.
- Mid - End of June: Two Final Presentations at SUGAR and at your company
Let others tell you
Testimonials
Many of our corporate partners participate in the program for several years. However, we are always looking for opportunities to expand our corporate partner network and receive new types of challenges. So, if you are interested in participating in the program please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
We are happy to provide you more insights into the program and discuss potential challenges with you.
