IA Collaborative, Amazon Help Select 2019 Kellogg Design Challenge Winners

Every year, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University hosts the world’s largest MBA business design competition, the Kellogg Design Challenge (KDC) – where teams from top business schools across the country compete to solve a real-life business innovation challenge using design thinking methods.

For this year’s challenge, Amazon asked students, “How could Prime Video become a destination for movie and TV viewers, outside of times when they’re planning on watching something?”

To tackle this challenge, students applied the design thinking approaches they learned through their MBA coursework and KDC programming – including an IA Collaborative-led workshop called “Design Your Next Competitor.”

IA Collaborative co-founder and Chief Design Officer Dan Kraemer was the featured keynote speaker for this year’s challenge and served as one of the judges for the competition alongside co-founder and Chief Design Strategy Officer Kathleen Brandenburg, Business Strategy Group Director Kyle Smith, Business Strategy Director Diane Lee, and Business Strategist Juan Luciano.

We were thrilled to have IA Collaborative’s involvement… they articulated how design and business must converge at every stage of the innovation lifecycle to create new growth – which is complementary to Kellogg’s MBA program and foundational to the KDC competition.

• Matt Zoerink, Senior Program Administrator for the Kellogg Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative

The Kellogg Design Challenge is among a portfolio of offerings made possible through the Kellogg Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative (IDEA), designed to equip entrepreneurs, innovators, and growth leaders as they face challenges at every stage of the business life cycle.

This process has fundamentally shifted my professional path and unlocked a new way of thinking for me. Applying design principles to problem solving leads to smarter solutions, and I look forward to leading with this perspective throughout my career.

• Oscar Rojas, MBA Candidate at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management; Kellogg Design Challenge qualifier

This year’s grand prize winners were selected for leveraging human-centered insights to create a compelling strategies Amazon could leverage tomorrow.