Speaker: Innovation, to me, is about being at the forefront of something. It’s about taking everything you know, from ideas to feelings to products, services and business, taking them all apart and using each aspect from those to rearrange it into something even better.  

Innovation, to me, is looking at different situations and different problems from a new perspective. The reason why I chose the Diploma of Innovation was to be able to find those different ways of thinking to solve those problems.Speaker: I chose to add on the Diploma of Innovation to my core degree because it was an experience unique to UTS. Being a course that was part of the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation, it meant that we were able to work together with people that we wouldn’t normally see in our main degree.

The Diploma in Innovation is a fantastic opportunity to prepare students beyond the core degree for a variety of career opportunities. It’s structured as a three-year program, it fits within the summers and winters, students can finish at the same time as their core degree, and it’s also unique in that it has roughly equal parts creative intelligence and entrepreneurship. So, by the time the students go through the diploma, they’ll learn some of the creative methods like convergent and divergent problem solving, problem generation, they should be able to think broadly, think about really complex problems, but also more granularly, to think about how they can actually make something happen. More importantly, we also bring in a lot of industry partners. It gives the students a really good opportunity to learn how industry thinks, so they get to see the industry partner actually uses a lot of the creative methods that we’re teaching in the classroom – that’s practically third-party validation. 

I feel like the diploma adds value into my core degree, just because in product design, we don’t really learn about how our designs can affect industry, and I feel like getting those perspectives from people that aren’t necessarily coming from a design perspective, and learning that collaboration and actually learning the business behind what we’re putting out into the world, is something that’s really important. 

I chose to study the Diploma in Innovation because I wanted to be doing a course where I was taught how to redefine the world around me. I’ve been very impressed so far with the emphasis placed on the future and accounting for that, how closely we’re working with industry partners, and the ability to work with people form completely different faculties and create projects that I would have not been able to create just working in my core degree.