As you prepare to pick your fall term electives this July, consider how you can differentiate your skillset. The Business Design Initiative (BDI) is offering two hands-on electives to help you navigate ambiguity, think strategically about the future, and solve real-world business challenges using human-centered design.

Here’s what you need to know about our Fall 2026 offerings:

Futures Thinking: Developing Business Foresight (RSM2517)

2026 Dates: Fall Term – Wednesdays
Time: 16:00-18:00
Location: Rotman Room 4057 (the BDI Studio) 

How do you make strategic decisions about products, services, and business models before market data even exists? This course prepares you for the ambiguous challenge of driving a culture of innovation. Using “pre-design” and strategic foresight methodologies, you will learn to spot early-stage macro trends and transform technology and behavior shifts into viable business models.

Key Learning Outcomes

• ‘Unlearn’ to Reframe: Train yourself to challenge assumptions and see global patterns of emergence from entirely new perspectives.
• Translate Signals to Opportunities: Spot weak, early-stage signals in technology and human behavior and map them to future market opportunities.
• Expand Your Data Set: Learn to translate abstract signals into concrete potential future opportunities and strategic leverage points. 

What Past Students Say:

• “This has been by far the most interesting course of my MBA. The real-world attitude is energizing and has helped me transition from the academic ‘first-year’ mindset back into the ‘how do I translate this material into real on-the-job skills’ mindset I need as a second year.”
• “It’s not easy to teach such a subjective course, but combining theory with practical use cases made it easy for me to visualize applications for strategic foresight.”
• “This course was such a great experience… It was very hands-on, which was really helpful.”

Business Design Practicum (RSM2524)

Theme for 2026: Applying design to an AI innovation challenge with an industry sponsor, TBD.

Format: Intensive, immersive learning delivered over a high-impact, two-week period. Students will have the chance to visit design studios across the city to learn directly from industry leaders. 

2026 Dates: Fall Intensive Term (FiT) – August 31 – September 11, Monday to Friday

Time: 13:30 – 17:00
Location: Rotman Room 4057 (the BDI Studio) and on-site at design studios across Toronto

This course blends interactive classroom lectures with direct industry engagement, taking you out of the classroom and into Canada’s business design and innovation ecosystem. You will learn industry-leading design methods, models, and case studies directly from firms using design-infused methods to innovate new services, processes, and experiences.

Past practicums have included site visits and unique engagement with leading organizations such as:

• Consultancies & Agencies: Deloitte, Bridgeable, Synthetikos
• Corporate & Finance: Scotiabank, Tim Hortons
• Public Sector & Healthcare: The Ontario Experience Design Lab, SickKids

The ultimate goal is for you to understand exactly how to apply human-centered design tools to your post-MBA target role.

Key Learning Outcomes

• Apply Core Principles: Use management frameworks, ethnographic methods, and design techniques to find, frame, and solve complex problems.
• Navigate Innovation Stages: Learn the foundational stages of the innovation development process within real organizations.
• Conduct User-Centered Research: Discover how user-centred research is executed on live, real-world business challenges.
• Master Problem-Solving Frameworks: Explore how empathy, creativity, prototyping, and storytelling are critical for driving innovation adoption in organizational settings.

What Past Students Say:

• “The course is so thoughtfully designed to show the potential of Business Design as a powerful tool and how it’s being used in the industry. It helped me expand my ‘thinking hat’ and look beyond limited visible areas of opportunities… I loved every minute of this course.”

• “This may serve as the model of an intensive course – with very prudent use of time and acceptable workload. As a complete novice, I was able to learn a lot… It is a great contrast and rounding out to the majority of classes which take place only in the classroom in lecture format.”

• “I enjoyed the class; the field visits were truly educational and beyond the theoretical learnings. The immersive learning and visiting experiences have given me a lot of inspiration and assistance.”

• “I leave this course understanding how business design is practiced in the workforce, which will help me not only in my own career choices but also as a future executive or manager in determining where and how to apply these concepts.”

How to Enrol

Both courses offer critical, practical frameworks that turn theory into immediate on-the-job skills. Look for RSM2517 and RSM2524 during the upcoming July registration window to secure your spot!

About the Rotman Business Design Initiative (BDI)

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.Visit the BDI website
Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Book a 1:1 Office Hour

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:

Veronica Hernandez (MBA ‘19)

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 Tran (MBA ‘22)

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.

Sartaj (Taj) Sohal (MBA ‘23)

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

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to receive updates and events straight to your inbox

On behalf of the Office of Student Engagement (OSE), I would like to extend a warm welcome to the MBA class of 2029!

The OSE team is dedicated to your academic and personal success. From navigating elective course selection, to connecting you with international study opportunities, club events, and championing diversity, inclusion and belonging at Rotman, we offer the guidance and support needed to enhance your experience within this community.

In the coming weeks you’ll meet our Official Welcome Committee, the Rotman Squad! This group of committed upper year MBA students will offer webinars and activities over the summer to connect you with other incoming students, current students and alumni. I encourage you to take some time to review the Go-To Guide for more details on these other activities.

If you have any questions that are not answered therein, please reach out to the team at me.mba.ose@rotman.utoronto.ca, we are more than happy to help you find the answer. We are all excited you are joining the community and look forward to meeting you in the coming months.

Welcome to Rotman!

Renice Jones
Director, Office of Student Engagement

Elective selection is in-progress. If you’re like most graduate business students you’re probably weighing trade-offs carefully. Not just interest level, but signal value. What actually differentiates you when it counts?

With that in mind, it’s worth considering at least one elective focused on sustainability and society. Not as a side interest, but as something increasingly central to how businesses operate. Across finance, consulting, tech, and startups, firms are dealing with a more complex mix of environmental, social, and geopolitical pressures than they were even a few years ago. They’re looking for people who can make sense of that complexity and tie it back to performance, risk and long-term value creation.

This isn’t a niche anymore. You’ll see these issues show up in strategy discussions, operating models and investment decisions. Leaders who can think beyond short-term results, and identify where risks and opportunities are emerging, tend to stand out pretty quickly. It’s a practical skill set, not just a conceptual one. 

And, frankly, the work is often more engaging. You’re not only optimizing what already exists; you’re thinking about how businesses adapt to real-world challenges like climate risk, supply chain resilience or shifting stakeholder expectations.

It’s a big part of what Rotman offers. The School’s purpose is “to create value for business and society.” More about what’s offered in the curriculum can be found here. And, of course, there’s a pile of co-curricular activities you can dive into too through student clubs, events and more. 

So yes, this is about choosing electives – but it’s also about positioning. Choosing an elective, or even pursuing a deeper focus in this space, signals that you understand where business is heading and that you’re prepared to operate there.

Questions? Want to learn more? Feel free to reach out to me at rlohin@rotman.utoronto.ca. 

Rod Lohin is the Executive Director of the Rotman Sustainability Initiative and a Sessional Instructor.

Did you know that once you complete the CliftonStrengths assessment, you can download your customized report called the Strengths Top 5, which not only provides a brief Shared Theme description for each of your top five talents, but also personalized Strengths insights uniquely generated based on how you answered the questions? Developed over decades spent studying millions of CliftonStrengths assessment results, these statements explain exactly how each of your talents makes you stand out from others with the same theme in their Top Five.

If you haven’t yet taken the assessment, make sure to do so before Orientation or your first coaching appointment – whichever comes first – and spend time reading through your Strengths Top 5 report. We recommend that you highlight or circle words and underline phrases that resonate with you and best describe you, as well as reflect on ways in which you may have used these natural talents throughout your life.

Haven’t received an access code or instructions on how to complete the assessment? Please email Career Services at career.services@rotman.utoronto.ca.

On behalf of Career Services, we are excited to welcome you to the Rotman Community and look forward to working with you on your career journey.

We recognize that your career outcomes will be an integral part of your Rotman degree. In Career Services, we promise to deliver a high-touch model in which we support students with their career needs through personalized and holistic career planning, employer engagement initiatives to promote hiring of Rotman talent, and year-round career management curricula tailored around your career stage and goals.

Sincerely,

Lyla Korhani
Director, Career Services

On behalf of the Office of Student Engagement (OSE), I would like to extend a warm welcome!

The OSE team is dedicated to your academic and personal success. From navigating elective course selection, to connecting you with international study opportunities, club events, and championing diversity, inclusion and belonging at Rotman, we offer the guidance and support needed to enhance your experience within this community.

In the coming weeks you’ll meet our Official Welcome Committee, the Rotman Squad! This group of committed upper year MBA students will offer webinars and activities over the summer to connect you with other incoming students, current students and alumni. Before you begin your studies, you can participate in the Self-Development Lab sessions to support your personal development and foundation and intensive courses in Pre-Program and Orientation that will help prepare you for your first year. I encourage you to take some time to review the Go-To Guide for more details on these other activities.

If you have any questions that are not answered therein, please reach out to the team at ose@rotman.utoronto.ca, we are more than happy to help you find the answer. We are all excited you are joining the community and look forward to meeting you in the coming months.

Welcome to Rotman!

Renice Jones
Director, Office of Student Engagement

We’re excited to have you join us this fall. As the Registrar and Director, Academic Services, my office (Registrar’s Office or RO for short) is responsible for ensuring your operationally smooth progression through your program and we are the stewards of your academic information. We partner with all Rotman programs to provide you with quality service during your journey with us. The RO front desk team can answer any questions you may have about fees, scholarships and awards, course enrolment, exams, grades, policy information and any other academic aspect of your program. Our website has up to date information on all of these topics. If you haven’t done so already I encourage you to visit us online.

We look forward to seeing you!

Caroline Pye
Registrar and Director, Academic Services

Welcome Full Time MBA Class of 2027!

We’re excited to have you join us! As the Registrar and Director, Academic Services, my office (Registrar’s Office or RO for short) is responsible for ensuring your operationally smooth progression through your program and we are the stewards of your academic information. We partner with all Rotman programs to provide you with quality service during your journey with us. The RO front desk team can answer any questions you may have about fees, scholarships and awards, course enrolment, exams, grades, policy information and any other academic aspect of your program. Our website has up to date information on all of these topics. If you haven’t done so already I encourage you to visit us online.

We look forward to seeing you at Orientation!

Caroline Pye
Registrar and Director, Academic Services

On behalf of Career Services, we are excited to welcome you to the Rotman Community and look forward to working with you on your career journey.

We recognize that your career outcomes will be an integral part of your Rotman degree. In Career Services, we promise to deliver a high-touch model in which we support students with their career needs through personalized and holistic career planning, employer engagement initiatives to promote hiring of Rotman talent, and year-round career management curricula tailored around your career stage and goals.

We also highly encourage you to attend our Career Discovery Series (CDS) throughout the summer months, with the first session of three taking place virtually on June 25th. This will allow you to get a head start on meeting your Career Coach and engage in sessions where you will learn about key career deliverables to prepare you for your career exploration and search before entering the program.

Sincerely,

Lyla Korhani
Director, Career Services