Where to play, how to win.

Global businesses increasingly appreciate how design and design thinking can provide them with high-level, strategic value and competitive advantage. In an intensely competitive market, with ever more diverse and demanding customers, executives are often left unsure of exactly what products, communications and services to create for what segments of the market. Design, with its ability to understand users, redefine problems and create systemic, human-centered solutions, can help companies better understand their customer's daily lives, and lead directly to valuable (and valued) offerings that are effectively tailored to their market.

This conference is conducted by the IIT Institute of Design, a graduate school of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Since its founding as the New Bauhaus in 1937, the Institute of Design has grown into the largest full-time graduate-only design program in the U.S., with over 150 students from around the world. The school offers professional Master of Design with areas of study in communication design, interaction design, product design and development, strategic design, systems thinking, and user research; a dual Master of Design / MBA degree program with the IIT Stuart School of Business; and the Master of Design Methods, a nine-month executive program. The Institute of Design created the country's first Ph.D. design program in 1991.