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As long as you teach just design or design management, thats all right. If
you teach just business, thats all right too. Its when you try to integrate the
two that the problems start.
This was how Bettina von Stamm, of the Innovation Exchange at London
Business School, set out the challenge confronting this seminar for design
and business management educators.
The purpose of the seminar was to discover why educators experience these
problems and to find ways round them. But first, another question needed
answering: why try to integrate design and business teaching methods at all?
The answer to this lies in the growing evidence that companies that
consciously use design are more successful innovators, and the widespread
feelingfirst expressed by professors of marketing 20-odd years agothat
therefore design is a potential strategic tool for business, albeit widely
neglected as such.
Key to creativity
In the educational arena, one reason for this neglect may be that design is
by its nature a cross-disciplinary activity which struggles to find its place
amid rigidly defined academic departments. Yet innovation too often relies
on connections between disciplines, and everybody regards that as a holy
grail. For von Stamm, design is a ready-made key to unlocking innovation
and creativity. Innovation has to be cross-disciplinary to be successful, and
design is an activity that generally operates across, and integrates, different
disciplines, she explains.
Here, then, is the incentive for bringing design into business education. Yet
efforts to do this havent really taken hold at the few UK business schools
that have tried it. David Walker of Giraffe Innovation Consultants reckons the
two warring tribes of design and business he described in his contribution to
Mark Oakleys handbook Design Management (1990) are a little less
entrenched than they were. But progress towards reconciliation, and beyond
that to productive collaboration, is slow. So what can be done to speed
things up?
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Visual leaders or village idiots
Borrowing that classic business school tool, the SWOT analysis, Walker
reveals some of the reasons for this. For a start, the strengths of management
education and design are nearly oppositeare they usefully complementary
or merely antithetical? Management education prizes the general, pragmatic
and global, and makes use of the case study method; design is particular,
craft-led, and requires imaginative work. As for weaknesses, an MBA program
has a strong orthodoxy in which it is hard to insert new elements, while
design teaching is personalised and egocentric, and encourages students to
develop a romantic self-image. They see themselves as the outsiders. They
train themselves to be the outsiders. So how is it that when they come to
work in business they want more status and respect?
Nevertheless, there are clear opportunities. Business could use more visually
led management in which design skills were used to reflect and analyse
management problems. Design, conversely, an activity that traditionally
resists frameworks, might sometimes benefit from being framed in a
management context. The risk, if these opportunities are not seized, is that
management education becomes more philistine, commercial and corrupt,
and that design education becomes an escapist fantasy turning out the
village idiots of the business community.
Seeds of enterprise
Margaret Bruce showed how the cross-disciplinary bridges might be built
amid a scene of much greater upheaval. Rather than add a design module to
an MBA or a business element to a design course, Bruce, as the director of
the Manchester Design Enterprise Centre, has brought the two together
anew for a new course in a more liberated environment. The opportunity
arose as the consequence of the coming merger of Manchester universities,
and marks an extension of an existing programme to bring more
entrepreneurship into scientific innovation in the citys educational
institutions.
By creating something new in this way, rather than tinkering with established
courses, it was possible to secure funding to create a venture centre. In this
environment, postgraduate students are introduced to the real tools of
enterprise through venturing, working with people with other skills, and
taking ideas to market. There is real-world contact with expert advisors and
investors. The most promising ideas generated are rapidly moved off-site for
business acceleration in an area already home to other micro businesses.
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There are no objective criteria for measuring the success of the programme,
Bruce concedes. But for the moment, this hardly matters. Im very excited. It
enables me in the academic world to do something very practical by bringing
scientists, technologists, designers and management people into this melting
pot where weve created new organisational forms and new types of funding
to facilitate business development and growth.
Differences that design makes
Business is about doing something uniquely better, and design really helps
achieve that uniqueness, suggests Simon Williams, a partner at the
Kleindahl venture production company. The search for difference is
hampered, however, not only in a design sense by the illusory safety of going
for a product that is like other products, but in an abstract management
sense too. Here the standardised knowledge set, in business education
globally sees to it that students tend to consider the same problems in the
same way, making it hardly surprising that they keep coming up with the
same tired solutions.
At Kleindahl, says Williams, we look for design because it createsand more
importantly, capturescommercial value. It is this captured value that allows
the company to set itself in a direction that is different from the tide of
market. It is also what allows it to charge a premium for its products, and to
build its brand and remain protected against copyists. Similar clarity of vision
at an organisational level this is what I want to do, and this is why its
different - generates loyalty among both staff and customers.
Newer to the business education experience is to look at the way innovative
and creative markets actually workby bringing in the right people with the
right creative skills at the right time. This project mode of operation may
require more coordination and management, but ways of achieving this can
be picked up from the creative industries too. Some ethics of creative work
encourage experiment and tolerate failure. And there are trajectories towards
success other than waiting for a blinding flash of inspiration. Design doesnt
have that many eureka moments, says Williams. It tends to have lots of halfideas. All these observations offer novel models for business.
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In conclusion, Bettina von Stamm returned to her conviction that design is
the key to making innovation happen. The trouble is, you cant tell people
what design is, you have to let them do it. This is the dilemma of design
management. In a business school, it has to be theoretical.
Well, does it? challenged one sharp member of the audience.
It suddenly seemed a fair question. Could the solution to teaching innovation
and creativity lie not so much in talking about design in business schools but
in actually getting students involved in it? At the moment, even the former
seems enough of a challenge, given the conservative nature of course
structures. Would it be worth pushing on to try to bring about this much
more surprising and ambitious shift in attitudes? Theres probably only one
way to find outand thats for the educators too to start doing it rather than
talking about it.
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Problems identified
University departments too
rigidly organised to deal
with cross-disciplinary design
Solutions recommended
Create university environments conducive to
cross-disciplinary cooperation (von Stamm)
Take advantage of large-scale change, such as
departmental or institutional mergers to establish
entirely new hybrid programmes unencumbered
by traditional departmental baggage (Bruce)
Rather than implant design in business education
or vice versa, create an entirely new course that
combines them and other vital disciplines
from the outset (Bruce)
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Cross-disciplinary
programmes to teach
innovation and creativity in
business schools are often
dependent on a key
individualif that person
leaves, the programmes tend
to wither
Cross-disciplinary
collaboration is hard to
activate at the faculty level
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