What happens when you give 111 international students 18 real innovation challenges and six weeks to solve them? According to Oyer Corazón Brabo, the answer is something most graduates will never experience elsewhere.
Oyer teaches Good Services, a course within IE Business School’s master’s program that tasks student teams with designing services for actual companies.
Real brands, real challenges, real stakes. Let’s dive in.
What is the Good Services course?
“This course is called Good Services. What do we do? We build good services for a real client.”
This year, that client is Nagami, the world’s largest 3D printing and design company, based just outside Madrid in Ávila, led by CEO Manuel Jiménez García. Eight student groups are each tackling a different challenge set by the company, all centred around themes of sustainability, circular economy, and human-centred design.
Last year, the client was Sepiia, a Spanish clothing brand whose products went on to win the National Innovation Prize in Spain.
What kinds of challenges are students working on?
“I decide within eight different challenges that this client wants our students to design. These challenges usually have to do with sustainability, with circular economy, and with many other good services items.”
One group is developing Queues as a Service: exploring how waiting in a queue could be transformed into something valuable. “Whenever people are waiting in a queue to get into a store or a museum, something good could be happening to them. Something good for their business, good for the planet, and good for the people.”
Another group is looking at how Nagami’s technology could be used to repair luxury design objects, drawing on the Japanese Kintsugi tradition of mending broken things with gold.
Last year’s cohort produced the Nomad Suit: a service that lets a traveller collect a wrinkle-free suit from a locker near their meeting, wear it, and return it. “That’s a way in which I’m paying for a service instead of a product.”
What skills do students develop?
“They have to learn how to do research. After that research, they have to define what are the real challenges underneath the official challenge. Then they have to design a prototype that they have to validate. So they’re basically learning how to launch a product or service, and they’re learning how to launch it with less risk than usual.”
On the design thinking methodology that underpins the course: “How to embrace uncertainty for sure, how to deal with real users, how to understand consumers’ needs and behaviors.”
Where does this take students after the master’s?
“Some of our projects that the students of this course have developed have ended up in Venture Lab. So they can become a business in themselves.”
For those who take a more traditional path, the course offers a distinctive portfolio piece. “Nobody around them has worked, has developed a good service for an incredible brand like Nagami or like Sepiia. So it’s quite an advantage among all other students that do not come from this course or do not come from IE.”
What is Oyer’s background, and how does it inform his teaching?
“I’ve been a designer since the last century, and I’ve always worked with incredible clients, corporations. My father was a great designer here in Spain as well. What I’ve learned with all this background is that the most important thing for my clients and for our brands is to understand consumer behavior.”
“I come from the design world, but ended up in this part – strategic design, service design – because it has a lot more to do with human-centered design. Items that have to be desirable by the user. Then they have to be feasible and they have to be profitable.”
Why should you do the Master in Creative Direction, Content & Branding?
“This master is going to give you all the tools and all the skills that you need to work in a professional environment,” says Oyer. “One of the key things that we really work on in this course is teamwork. I am absolutely sure that none of you are going to be working alone in your professional life. You have to learn how to work with teams, with people that you like, people that you do not like, and you have to get the most out of a team.”
The Master in Creative Direction, Content & Branding is a ten-month, full-time program based in Madrid that trains students to conceive, drive and implement creative projects from start to finish – combining visual and digital media production with a strategic grounding in business and brand communication. Graduates go on to roles such as creative director, content manager and brand strategist at companies including Amazon, TikTok and HBO.
The Good Services course sits at the heart of what the program promises: real clients, real challenges, and work that ends up in your portfolio. If that sounds like the kind of education you’re looking for, you can find out more about the program below.
Benjamin is the editor of Uncover IE. His writing is featured in the LAMDA Verse and Prose Anthology Vol. 19, The Primer and Moonflake Press. Benjamin provided translation for “FalseStuff: La Muerte de las Musas”, winner of Best Theatre Show at the Max Awards 2024.
Benjamin was shortlisted for the Bristol Old Vic Open Sessions 2016 and the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2023.
