What is the course about?

Attention is the most valuable currency in today’s dynamic and fast business environment. How can you clearly communicate complex ideas and project plans? How can you generate interest and captivate your audience? The answer lies in "Visual Thinking", a growing trend that originates from Silicon Valley and the Stanford D-School: practitioners as well as researchers have realised that the more complex, dynamic and electronic the business environment becomes, the more important it is to be able to master such complexity via visualisation in meetings, presentations and discussions.

This is the first public online course offered by the top-tier business school, the WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management. The Economist places WHU's MBA programme at #6 in the world and the Financial Times calls it the #1 MBA and Masters in Management programme in Germany. The regular course is one of the highest student-rated courses in the WHU MBA programme. The course is taught by the award-winning Prof. Dr. Christoph Hienerth, the Chair of the Entrepreneurship and New Business Development at WHU.

What is included in this course?

By enrolling in this course, you will gain access to:
• All Course Material
• Challenging & Fun Assignments
• Interactive Global Community
• Flexible Time Management

Upon completion of this course, you will receive :
• A Statement of Participation

In addition, this course offers flexible time management. With a workload of 12-16 hours, the suggested course length is about 4 weeks. If you can’t spare 3-4 hours a week or would rather finish the course faster, you can do so as well. Take as little or as much time as you need and complete the course at your own pace.

Want to discover the online learning experience?

What will you learn?

You will learn to create representative objects and artefacts as well as people and characters. This includes:

• Revealing essential problems everyone faces in drawing and overcoming your fears

• How to draw and visualise simple forms, people, perspective and the third dimension

• Making drawing a daily habit and a simple routine

Visual presentation skills in the business setting

You will learn visual structuring methods so that you can transfer elementary drawing skills to the business environment and explain complex concepts with the common language of visualisation. This includes:

• Visual thinking and communication techniques

• The visual setting in meetings (flip-charts, whiteboards, blackboards, etc.)

• Some psychological aspects of communication between the presenter and the audience

• Essential visualisation tools for business

• The option to take your skills to the next level using free electronic drawing software

What is the target audience?

The course learnings can be applied to many expertise levels and sectors. Both inexperienced and experienced presenters and workers in the business world, even creative designers and artists who want to develop a business edge, have a lot to gain from the course material and lectures. More specific groups include:

Team Leads and Managers

• Communicate strategies more clearly by visualising key take-aways

• Improve meetings and presentations by using whiteboard sketches rather than boring power-point slides

• Reduce the time needed to create strategic documents

Sales Agents and Account Managers

• Create unique sales documents in less time

• Give presentations that stand out and make sure your leads remember you

• Be able to create engaging material on-the-fly and less dependent on prepared documents

Strategy, Business and Product Developers

• Simplify and explain complex systems by using visual structures

• Improve your ability to sketch and structure new ideas and concepts

• Take on new information and quickly integrate them into your concepts

Course content

Course instructors

Go to profile

Prof Christoph Hienerth

Prof. Dr. Christoph Hienerth is the Chair of Entrepreneurship and New Business Development at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management. He earned his doctoral degree (PhD) from WU Vienna, where he also went on to complete his post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) as an assistant professor at the Department for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. From 2006 to 2012, he held a tenured position as Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Department for Innovation and Organizational Economics. Prof. Hienerth had various research visits and fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard Business School (HBS), McGill University and George Washington University.

Research Focus
• Identification and development of opportunities
• Entrepreneurship in open and user innovation settings
• Entrepreneurial risk and uncertainty
• Corporate Entrepreneurship
• Business ecosystems and new business models
• Social Entrepreneurship

Publications, Awards & Corporate Projects
His research has been published in leading international and national journals such as Research Policy, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning, Journal of Organizational Design, Family Business Review and Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft (ZfB). He has received several awards for his work in research as well as in teaching. Prof. Hienerth has gained expertise in corporate entrepreneurship through several industry projects with international companies such as Schindler, Deutsche Telekom, Palfinger, Bayer, MAN, LEGO, Fujitsu, Siemens VDO, SAS, Grundfos and Coloplast. He has given keynotes and was scientific advisor for governmental institutions in several countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, UK, Czech Republic.