Innovation with design thinking

Turn your ideas into reality!

 

Collaborating with Stanford...

...and a Global Network of Design Innovators

 

Outstanding alumni careers

Diversity drives innovation: discover what happened to our students after ME310.

 

Unique spaces in Paris

Innovate, prototype, rest, have fun and much more

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In the course of a full-time academic year, three multidisciplinary teams of four students each, located at d.school and in an institution belonging to the international network headed by Stanford University (including HPI Potsdam in Germany and Aalto University’s Design Factory in Finland), innovate from a realworld brief, with high strategic stakes, brought by an industrial partner and entailing the reinvention of a product/service in a potential growth market.

Find out more about the d.school

Our ambition is to turn our ideas into reality.

Innovation expert

The d.school in Paris educates tomorrow’s innovation leaders.

Your career

Become a Human Centered Innovation evangelist in your future companies!

Everyone’s welcome

Engineers, designers, architects, business profiles… : you can all candidate.

Real-world impact

Our goal? To go beyond the “paper”project” and turn ideas into reality.

Our corporate partners

We offer you the opportunity to go beyond the “paper project” and have a real impact on major societal, industrial and environmental issues.

Since 2009, our students have reinvented a bathroom for seniors (Lapeyre/Saint Gobain), a camera for the fire services (Thales), a coffee machine at work (Nescafé), and more. You too will be able to reinvent an industry, by developing a proposal that users want, is technologically feasible and viable for the project partner, with the aim of generating maximum real-world impact!

20
theory
80
practice
1
coach per team
2
trips abroad including one in Stanford

A project from A to Z

Teams observe and interview users to better understand their needs, benchmark existing technologies and products to identify the design opportunities, extensively brainstorm to discover the obvious, crazy, and novel ideas, and iteratively prototype to quickly test their ideas and get a better understanding of their designs. The end result is a refined design concept backed with key insights.

Learn through practice

The culture of design thinking is acquired through a practical approach to pedagogy: give shape to your ideas through fast prototyping, to enrich the experience through two-way interaction with users.

Exploration. Autonomy. Inspiration.

Each team has a dedicated budget to cover its exploration and prototyping activities, around a project developed with an industrial partner.

User-centric methodology

Our working method presupposes a strong capacity for initiative, responsibility and empathy.

Engineers

Business

Designers

Other field of study ?

Architects

Career change ?

You can apply too!

You have a degree in business, design, engineering, architecture, or any other field ? You may apply to our ME310 program and join our multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural teams.

Sharing the experience

Our alumni careers

The best argument for deciding to pursue the ME310 program is to look at the achievements of the people who did it.

Pierre ValadeFounder of Sunrise app

No more paper projects that never see the light of day, you now have a little under one year to get organized and design the finished prototype of one of tomorrow’s products or services. ME310 is a perfect mix between creating a start-up and project management in an industrial firm, with only the good sides of both.

Gabrielle SergentIndustrial engineer, promotion 2016-2017

I created Ledger in 2014 and I live between San Francisco and Paris. I just fundraised 75 millions of dollars for my start-up.

Thomas FranceCo-founder of Ledger, Promotion 2009-2010

Le programme ME310 m'a permis d'intégrer le CarLab de Valeo et je pratique désormais l'innovation au quotidien dans ma vie professionnelle.

Anna ZkarkovaProject manager, Valeo CarLab, promotion 2015-2016

To discover on the ME310 program that the intuitions I had about product design and innovation had been theorized and formalized in the US impressed me very much. Being an entrepreneur and being able to draw on the ME310 program to understand how to build innovative projects that fulfill needs, are simple to use and become successful, all this meets the definition of what we learned at the d.school.

Aurélien SibirilCo-founder & CTO @ Zyl, promotion 2010-2011

Hard to imagine better conditions for learning to innovate and create new products and services:
multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, a trip to Silicon Valley, a budget for prototyping, continuing links with industrial firms, and 9 full-time month to make a real product.

Félix MarquetteDesigner, Promotion 2013-2014
Alumni Directory

Real Companies. Real Projects. Real Designs.

The methodology

The objective of d.school Paris is to educate tomorrow’s innovation leaders, whether entrepreneurs or project leaders in big companies. The culture of design thinking is acquired through a practical approach to pedagogy, the realization of an idea through a 3-stage design cycle. The first stage is inspiration, where the intention is filtered through the screen of the needs, dreams and constraints of potential users; the second is ideation, which gives shape to the ideas through fast prototyping, to enrich the experience through two-way interaction with users; and finally implementation, which converts the imaginative response into reality through storytelling, a pilot, and the generation of operations within the business model.

Our spaces

The d.school is located in the Coriolis building at famous engineering school École des Ponts on the Cité Descartes campus (20 kms East of Paris): 300 m² of spaces dedicated to creative design and innovation. Our studio is a dedicated space for students to eat, live, and have fun with their teams, classmates, and projects. In addition to the dedicated project spaces for each team, the rapid prototyping machine shop, a kitchen, brainstorming rooms, a library to get inspired, a zen space to rest, a fun space to chill are all available to the students 24/7. The space is the central hub of the ME310 community and the site for the weekly get together known as SUDS.

Roots

As an entity dedicated to innovation, d.school Paris bases its pedagogy on design thinking, an approach that was born and put down its theoretical roots at Stanford University in California. This concept is simultaneously a discipline, a process and a culture, a combination that has led to the reinvention of product and service design. Its aim? To find solutions that make sense for individuals, are technically feasible and economically viable, as summed up by Tim Brown, president of the IDEO design agency.

More information...

  • Recruitment : resume & cover letter

  • 2 interviews (in French and English)

  • Cost of the course : € 3200

  • From the end of September to June

  • Master level program

  • 2 trips included

  • Submissions : 1st August

The program includes two trips abroad incl. one to the Stanford University d.school and San Francisco, where participants can discover, explore and immerse themselves in the Silicon Valley mindset and its community of entrepreneurs and innovators.

Some of our projects

More case studies

The ME310 international network

The setting up of d.school Paris in 2009 was part of an international movement initiated by the universities of Stanford (California) and Potsdam (Germany), and maintained by Finland’s University of Aalto. Our school is a member of the international SUGAR network of universities offering design thinking courses or programs.

Find out more

You want to join our program?