Telenor Design Academy
We need everyone to think like a designer, but we don’t need everyone to be a designer.
The world is changing. Many skills important today will be less important in a decade. Some of the jobs we do today will disappear, but new roles will emerge. Design plays a fundamental role in innovation and transformation, creating the products we buy, the services we use and the digital and built environments we live and communicate in.
As an attempt to prepare Telenor for some of these changes, we just launched Telenor Design Academy. With this programme we want to teach how design is an integral part of our business, and our customers decision making— and how design thinking can be applied to any challenge you may face. This particular programme has a mission, and that is to inspire a designers’ mindset in our company. We are not here to educate people to become professional designers. For that there are universities and design schools. (*)
Designers are needed in every organisation and in every industry, and as a design advocate for our company, we [Telenor Design] are charged with championing design to everyone internally at Telenor, across all the Business Units.
We have some ambitions for this programme. First, to teach a problem oriented way of thinking. Second, to provide a platform where everyone may collaborate and learn, by bringing together people from a range of disciplines across the BUs to work on challenges. Finally, to enable employees to become more strategic in their thinking and support their colleagues to think in a more design-led manner.
In short, we want to create the next generation design champions inside Telenor. Students taking part will develop a range of skills including complex problem-solving and creative and critical thinking for real life scenarios.
The nominations for this round are finished, and the lucky 30 who got a seat have already started their journey. We look forward to following you in inspiring programme and I very much look forward to seeing the results.
(*) We offer courses for professional designers as well, and next year we will offer a limited amount of seats on a 12 months course in design leadership through our partner the Dutch company Grow.
