D-Lab: Design for Service Innovation—Financial Services

This will be an interdisciplinary, project-based course offered at the new GSB campus. All teams will design new solutions to address real problems that affect actual consumers of financial services and the organizations that serve them. We will focus on designing economically viable services to address the needs of low and middle-class customers who are typically underserved in the financial services sector. The “solution space” may involve new process protocols, organization structures, software, websites, or public policy recommendations. However, we will not rule out the possibility of a team working on a great new product offering that may improve the delivery of financial services.

We are in the process of defining the specific projects that teams will tackle in winter 2012. The following are the domain areas from which the final projects will be selected: a) Improving the experience of finding, comparing and applying for college loans; c) Improving financial literacy of young adults or other underserved populations; d) Improving the experience of finding, comparing and applying for mortgage loans; e) Using social technologies to personalize the lender-borrower transaction in order to reduce defaults; f) Designing a gas purchasing product that protects consumers from volatile gas prices; g) Creating marketplaces to monetize illiquid assets (such as human capital, jewelry).  Students will select a project, assemble a user group, and work with that group to gain deep empathy about the users’ need. Then they will craft a point of view statement, ideate, prototype, test, iterate  and finally develop a six-month implementation plan.

The course is open to graduate students from all schools and departments: business (MBA1, MBA2, PhD, Sloan), engineering (MS, PhD), humanities, sociology, psychology, education, law, and Medicine. Admission by application, which can be found on the course website. Applications are due November 16.