During the programme

In a world that is constantly changing, businesses and companies must always adapt to new situations and trends to stay relevant for customers. How do you, as a Creative Business professional, add real value to a customer’s life while generating profit and constantly reinventing your business model? During this course, we look into the factors that influence the success of a company and its environment and teach you how to methodically investigate struggling companies and identify opportunities to enhance or reinvent them. 

Creativity is a mindset that is essential in developing novel or unorthodox solutions that do not depend wholly on past or current solutions. It’s a way of employing strategies to clear your mind so that your thoughts and ideas can transcend what appears to be the limitations of a problem. Students will also learn how to develop a creative thinker attitude: curious, optimistic, and imaginative. During this course, students will be presented with a palette of case studies revolving around creativity from different angles, fields, and forms of presentations, meant to teach them how to design disruptive solutions and think “outside of the box”.

During the course Collaborative Studio students will work in teams on various design challenges for an external client.  Each week there will be a new design challenge waiting for the student-teams, and after receiving background information, design theory and related case studies, the students will tackle the design-challenge pressure-cooker style, following the steps of Design Thinking - empathizing with the target audience, defining the client and customer needs, ideating and generating design prototypes. 

In the course Effective Communication, you will learn the tools of the communication trade (theories, models, elements of argumentation and so on) and how to apply them effectively in different communication situations: whether one on one, in a group or with various sets of stakeholders. Everything is communication, and in taking this course you will learn how to use it to be persuasive, both at home and at work.

Marketing is not just about having a great product or service. It's about meeting consumers' needs, understanding what makes them tick, and speaking to them in the ways that make them want to engage. Therefore, understanding consumer behaviour is a marketer's gold. And as we've seen time and time again, those who use it best, and align their marketing decisions to what the data tells them, are those who win. In this course we will focus on developing a good understanding of consumer needs and behaviour in relation to the key principles of the marketing discipline, so you will be able to positively contribute to marketing and marketing communications activities within your future professional field.

Challenging Human Bias is a course that lays the foundation of human-centred thinking by inviting you to put yourself in the shoes of others to understand how unchecked biases can affect them. Unconscious bias are made visible in everyday solutions: the way a product, a service is designed can cater for one user but can also exclude another one. This course is also a journey of self-discovery as you will be invited to develop self-awareness by considering your blind spot - one’s tendency to recognize that others are biased while failing to see how bias influences one’s own thinking.

In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of doing applied research in Creative Business. This is an iterative process in which you continuously gather insights and empathize with different stakeholders. You will learn to become a researcher and design thinker – agile, innovative and creative. We take you through the basics of doing research, from unpacking a research problem to formulating specific research questions and selecting appropriate methods.

Media Culture is an introduction to media studies, which focuses on the international media landscape. It offers students an overview of the cultural, social and historical concerns that matter when working in the contemporary media industry. Students reflect on their role as active audiences, consumers and users of global media content. They analyse contemporary trends and conflicts in current media culture. Within class, students debate the social aspects of these new developments in the field of media.

From a professional perspective, when you join a new organisation, you need to be “onboarded”: going through the process of learning about the new systems, getting to know the team and the company culture. This is also what we do in the additional track Professional Onboarding: make you familiar with the organisation (HU, CB), your team (programme, class) and tasks (courses, curriculum). In the first block you will receive regular newsletters, have weekly class sessions with your progress coach, and visit some lecture hall sessions on relevant study topics.

In this course, students will zoom in on several sectors in Creative Business and will develop future scenarios for existing businesses that operate on a global scale. By examining the relationship between technological advancements and growing internationalization, students will acquire both theoretical concepts (e.g. affordances, remediation, social constructivism) and practical skills (e.g. future cones, uncertainty matrices, community mapping) to create a probable future scenario for the business in a specific sector.

The course “World of work” gives students working knowledge of the most important forces that are shaping the creative business workplace and the role they will play in this field.  During this course, students first get a full overview of workforce developments and the various types of organizations (from startups to multinational corporations), then dive deeper into either entrepreneurship or professional practice by assuming one of these roles and developing a professional product either in a company or entrepreneurship. 

As globalization touches more and more aspects of our daily interactions, intercultural contact is inevitable. Brands often sought to homogenize messages to ensure a wider reach, but increasingly, a celebration and recognition of cultural individuality is becoming the norm when branching out to new regions and cultural audiences. In this course, students conduct actual user research in order to develop an accurate social and cultural snapshot of an alternative target audience before investigating options for a cross-media communications strategy tailored to appeal to that audience.

In any professional business, research is fundamental in the development of products and services, ranging from social media strategies for small start-ups to the production of empathy maps for museums. This development process is based on the application of research methods, the analysis of data, and the creation of prototypes. In this course, students learn based on a fictional case how to gather research data through the use of applied research methods, analyse such data through data platforms and tools, and to develop a prototype.

Culture is complex, and reflected in every network that we are in, and every action that we do. Diversity is key in this course. Our focus is not only on national culture, but on culture as a complex social network or web, composed of cultural differences such as gender, age, ethnicity and lifestyle. This course will teach you the art important concepts in the field of cultural studies, and learn you how to translate these in real life skills.

Gamers, fans, hackers are examples of technology and media communities which are often described as participatory cultures. Our common goal is to gain deep insights about emerging participatory cultures. At the end of this course, you will co-create an event with all classes in which you present your participatory culture in an interactive innovative way (e.g. a café, a panel, a game, a YouTube set-up). Think outside the box!

In this course you’ll learn about the big ideas, strategies, tools, and theories that brand strategists use every day to build stronger brands. You'll then be given a real brief, from a real client, and use what you've learnt to make their brand stronger. This will be a highly experimental, hands-on course, so show up ready to roll up your sleeves, and solve real brand problems.

If creative and innovative organisations want to be successful in highly uncertain and competitive environments, they need to understand how to build creative teams. In this course you will soon be working on a real life creative briefing experience with reality check, whilst participating in a creative team where everyone has a particular role. With your team you will be working towards a final presentation. Will your pitch match the expectations of the client?

In this specialisation course, you learn to evaluate, strategize and conceptualise interactive experiences such as events, installations, games. In the first section of the course you will learn the basics of interactive design. In the second section of the course, you will use the acquired knowledge to conceptualise and prototype an interactive experience they will develop for a particular briefing.

This courses teaches you how news media and organisations interact through public relations in the public sphere. You will learn how framing in the media works and how to analyse news by spotting the different perspectives about relevant issues and actors. You will use the to apply professional communication for designing and distributing their own framing of a relevant story on behalf of a client.

How do you create content that succeeds, in an era of peak attention, digital detoxing, and ad-blocking? And how do we ensure that content is deeply relevant, not just to our client’s problems and our consumers lives, but also the needs of digital channels and the black box technology and algorithms that power them. In this course you'll learn how to do just that. This is a hands-on course, where you'll dive into the deep end of both the strategic and creative sides of the content marketing process, honing your own techniques, insights and point of view along the way. 

We all want people to do stuff. Whether you want your customers to buy from you, vendors to give you a good deal, your employees to take more initiative, or your spouse to make dinner. In this course you’ll learn the most important drives that motivate people, how the human brain uses 2 systems to make decisions and the forces that shape human behaviour.