With a broad background in design leadership, product innovation, user centred design thinking and launch of innovative global products and services, Michael now focuses on building human centered innovation cultures in large size organisations. His hands-on leadership approach has brought him to companies like Amazon, PayPal, eBay, Nokia and Lego as well as several startups. He currently leads the UX and design thinking practice at Ørsted, a leading renewable energy company.
At Ørsted, Michael oversees the creation of the Design Thinking strategy while maturing the UX design function for the company. This includes operational, strategic and cultural ways to embed design and design thinking in a program at global scale in conjunction with the agile transformation into SAFe (Scaled Agile Frameworks).
Michael lectures and teaches at several design schools and MBA programmes in design thinking and design strategy. He has recently been appointed adjunct professor of Design at the Royal Academy of Architecture and Design in Copenhagen (KADK). Furthermore he actively pursues communities and partnerships that rethink design in concert with the fields of Psychology, Business development and Marketing in an effort to create new frameworks for change.
Michael McKay will lead a lab on how to use rich narratives in innovation. He will start the lab off by explaining the reasons for using narratives, and will introduce a template for participants to use in crafting their own storylines. Michael will also share different variations of narratives to serve as inspiration. The lab participants will learn and work on the following:
- Understand the role narratives can play in innovation – and learn how to use narratives and build a storyline in their own work
- Craft a storyline around a theme using provided visual props or their own sketches
- Create a short film to document the storyline
- Harvest learnings, share, and view other participants’ work during video screening of films
- Customer Centric Innovation and Design Thinking
- Innovation Lab