As you prepare to step onto campus this fall, you’re likely already thinking about how to maximize your time at Rotman and what skills will truly set you apart in the job market.
The data is already in on what makes Rotman graduates uniquely competitive. In LinkedIn’s 2025 Top 100 MBA Programs for Career Growth, “business design” and “design thinking” were explicitly named as two of the top notable skills of Rotman alumni, alongside “product management.”
In today’s market, employers aren’t just looking for traditional business analysts or consultants; they want leaders who can navigate ambiguity and uncover hidden opportunities. At Rotman, that training starts at the Business Design Initiative (BDI).
Welcome to BDI: Your Launchpad for Innovation and Divergent Thinking
The Business Design Initiative is Rotman’s experiential learning centre for human-centered design and strategic foresight. BDI connects students, alumni, and industry to explore complex challenges and identify new opportunities for differentiated innovation. Through applied, hands-on learning, BDI helps leaders at every level build the mindsets and capabilities to navigate uncertainty, solve problems differently, and drive human-centered transformation.
How You’ll Learn
We don’t just teach business design out of a textbook. BDI brings learning to life through:
- Experiential Studio Courses: All our business design courses are highly hands-on and experiential. You’ll learn and develop human-centered design skills like problem framing, user research, journey mapping, and rapid prototyping to craft products and services that customers actually love.
- Co-Curricular Workshops: Dive into bootcamps covering high-demand toolkits focused on specialized areas of human-centered design practice. In the past, we’ve covered topics like user-centered approaches in quantum tech development, capital design, strategic foresight in sector-specific contexts, and systemic design.
- Industry Integration: We bring top design practitioners, alumni, and companies directly into our space, giving you a front-row seat to how these methodologies can drive business growth and innovation. Our courses involve working on live briefs from industry partners, and past offerings have partnered with organizations like DoorDash, Home Hardware, Loblaws, Tim Hortons, the Toronto Transit Commission, and more.
How We Can Help You Succeed
- Accelerate Career Growth: Whether you’re keen to focus on a business design-specific role or a related field like product management, management consulting, venture capital, healthcare strategy, or entrepreneurship, we provide the portfolio-building experiences that make your resume stand out and give you a competitive edge.
- Master Ambiguity: The MBA journey throws a lot of complex, open-ended questions your way. Business design teaches you a structured framework to tackle messy, unstructured, and ambiguous problems with confidence.
- Build Your Network: Through BDI events, you’ll collaborate directly with industry practitioners and a powerful network of Rotman alumni who lead top design, product, and innovation teams in a variety of sectors.
Alumni Spotlight: From BDI to the Real World
Here are three Rotman graduates who used their business design education at Rotman to land and excel in transformative, post-MBA roles:
After beginning her career in marketing and brand management at Mattel, Veronica used her time at Rotman to specialize in Business Design. Her pivot launched a career tackling complex design challenges across the telecommunications, retail, and healthcare sectors: from co-architecting a unified commerce journey for a major telco, to co-designing one of Canada’s largest pharmacy chain’s COVID-19 vaccination scheduling experiences. She is currently a Journey Manager, Service Design at TELUS.
Ly studied a Bachelor of Economics degree and held early roles in retail category management and procurement. With the newfound passion for human-centered design discovered during her Rotman MBA, she became a service designer, working on improving client experiences across various touchpoints in the service cycle. She currently works at Westmoreland Insurance Group, and also runs her own business helping startups bring their ideas to life through impactful software solutions.
With a commerce degree and experience as a financial advisor at major Canadian banks, Taj discovered a passion for service design during his time at Rotman. He now works as a Senior Journey Designer at Sun Life, leading early-stage problem framing, research synthesis, facilitation, and future-state experience design across claims and coverage, chronic disease management, and AI-driven self-serve. He enjoys working in the space between strategy and design, especially when it means bringing cross-functional teams together across design, product, operations, and technology.
Learn More and Connect
Website: www.rotman.utoronto.ca/bdi
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/business-design-initiative-rotman
Instagram: @rotmanbdi
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