Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this Article: The more I am involved in the Design Thinking community, the less hopeful I am that an answer to this question will come from the community itself.  It looks like our community is going to be engaged in this and other discussions while a business model of Design Thinking emerges, which will ultimately dictate what is taught and how.

Original Post and comments HERE at BusinessWeek.com

How to Nurture Future Leaders

Design thinking brings creative techniques to business. The only problem? No one can agree on how to teach its methods

It’s a scary time to be a new graduate. But some seem more optimistic than others.

Around the world, graduates are emerging from interdisciplinary master’s programs that integrate design, technology, and business. These professionals are trained in “design thinking.” Sure, it’s the latest trendy term to sweep the business world, but it’s a technique that designers and executives alike hope may help to provide a solution to some of the world’s serious challenges.

The only problem? There’s no consensus on how to teach it. And there’s no agreement on where these thinkers should spring from.

Should design schools create more business-focused creatives, or should business schools foster creative thinking in their MBAs? For now, both approaches to innovating education are rolling out, and both types of programs appear on the 2009 BusinessWeek D-school List.

Different Programs, Different Results

As departments build on their unique strengths to formulate new programs, varied results have emerged. Some programs are co-taught by professors from design, business, and other departments, such as at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school).

Others, such as a partnership between three schools in Helsinki, bring together students from various universities for cross-disciplinary project work. Another approach: dual degrees in business administration and design, such as the MBA and Master’s in Design program from Illinois Institute of Technology.

Despite the different approaches, the programs have a similar aim: to merge design, business, and technology. Professors urge students to value cross-disciplinary teamwork, to defy inclinations and shatter silos. The theory: Working across functions will offer fresh perspectives on perennial problems and generate more comprehensive and original results.

The goal is to combine creative confidence and analytic ability, says David Kelley, founder of Stanford’s d.school and design consultancy IDEO.

“The best students are competent in both.”

It’s still early days, and the chasm between business and design yawns. Closer cooperation is necessary. Designers who exhibit business acumen can be involved at a more strategic level within a corporation. Executives who learn to apply design methods such as prototyping or brainstorming have a better shot at building a corporate culture that nurtures innovation—and the business’ bottom line.

What to Expect?

According to Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and one of the early supporters of the discipline, “Every corporation needs a design-thinking type.” That includes industries that may seem like unlikely bedfellows for design, such as banks and law firms.

Visa (V) launched the Global Innovation Strategy Group in September 2008 to align corporate strategy with consumer needs. “As great as an MBA is, we were looking for something more,” says Scott Sanchez, senior business leader for the group. Earlier in 2009, Sanchez hired Laura Jones, 27, a recent graduate from Stanford’s d.school program.

And a number of corporations such as Procter & Gamble (PG), Samsung, and Steelcase (SCS) are beginning to integrate design thinking and its proponents across operations.

Harley-Davidson (HOG) has hired graduates from Northwestern University’s joint MBA and Master’s in Engineering Management program into its Leadership Development Program and gradually promoted them to all levels of management—from product development and marketing to finance and global manufacturing strategy, says Matt Levatich, president and chief operating officer.

Designer-Led Backlash

And yet, as design thinking moves to the front burner as an innovation tool of choice, questions remain about how its theories can slot into the framework of the business world. Jones is quick to detail that not all of her classmates have found jobs that call for design thinking. Not all corporations know what it is or how to apply it. “It is a work in progress,” she says.

Some designers also balk at the concept, seeing it as a dilution of an industry and discipline they themselves have studied so hard and for so long. “If you teach design thinking, you’re teaching talking: how to use words to describe design,” says Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of San Mateo (Calif.)-based design and innovation consultancy Jump Associates. Patnaik says he looks to hire designers and then trains them in business skills as necessary.

Gadi Amit, founder of San Francisco-based NewDealDesign, also has reservations. “Some people think they graduate with industrial design plus capabilities,” he says. Instead, he says, the graduates lack grounding. Nonetheless, Amit acknowledges things may yet evolve. “I am not precluding that maybe there will be a new type of designer, splitting the profession into all sorts of strands and directions, but we are not there yet.”

At this stage, the true impact of design thinking has yet to be seen in industry, as classes are small and graduates are a mere drop in the ocean of global business. But educators, executives, and public officials around the world are investing in the potential of the technique to provide new insight and enhance innovation in a time that desperately needs both. We may not truly appreciate the fruits of these educational experiments for some time, but if effective, these graduates might just redefine the way the world does business.

Venessa Wong is an innovation and design writer for BusinessWeek.

Overview of Article:

Thoughts on Article: This is a really strong argument for the position Bill takes.  His take on the “T” shaped people and the “I” shaped people is very important to anyone working to assemble a Design Thinking Team.

Original Post at BusinessWeek Here

Overview of Post: This one goes back a few years and reminds us of the early understanding of what Design Thinking was all about.

Thoughts on Post: Some great  references to the early foundational works and thoughts that got this field going.  It would be good to recapture some of this clarity.

Original Post Here at BusinessWeek

By Bruce Nussbaum

“Design thinking” can create rewarding experiences for consumers — the key to earnings growth and an edge that outsourcing can’t beat.

You can’t Six Sigma your way to high-impact innovation, but you can design your company to generate products and services that provide great consumer experiences, top-line revenue growth, and fat profit margins. That’s the sometimes-painful message CEOs in America are learning today.

Quality-management programs can’t give you the kind of empathetic connection to consumers that increasingly is the key to opening up new business opportunities. All the B-school-educated managers you hire won’t automatically get you the outside-the-box thinking you need to build new brands — or create new experiences for old brands. The truth is we’re moving from a knowledge economy that was dominated by technology into an experience economy controlled by consumers and the corporations who empathize with them.

“MASTERS OF HEURISTICS.” Indian and Chinese engineers and manufacturers are doing more and more of the old cost- and quality-control Six-Sigma stuff (you haven’t seen anything yet in outsourcing), leaving U.S. corporations to build new business models around customer culture. America’s customer culture is a divide that foreigners have a hard time penetrating — which gives U.S. companies their best, and perhaps only, shot for growth. And design thinking is increasingly the discipline managers are embracing to penetrate this culture.

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, is reshaping his entire MBA program around the principle that “businesspeople will have to become more ‘masters of heuristics’ than ‘managers of algorithms,’” that “design skills and business skills are converging,” as he said in the Winter, 2004, edition of the school’s alumni publication. It’s time to embrace a new value proposition based on creating — indeed, often co-creating — new products and services with customers that fill their needs, make them happy, and make companies and shareholders rich.

Understanding, empathy, problem-solving — these are the heuristic managerial skills needed today, argues Martin, who advises Procter & Gamble (PG ) CEO A.G. Lafley. That should tell you a lot. Lafley is using design thinking to transform P&G into an innovation powerhouse. Managers who want to “get” the new innovation paradigm should check out Martin’s MBA and exec-ed programs.

RIGHT-BRAIN GAINS. Martin isn’t the only one who understands this major shift in the economy and why CEOs must respond. In his new book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, Daniel Pink argues that left-brain linear, analytical, and computer-like thinking are being replaced by right-brain empathy, inventiveness, and understanding as skills most needed by business.

Pink points to Asia, automation, and abundance as the reasons behind the shift. What does this mean for future jobs? Winners are designers, inventors, counselors, ethnographers, social psychologists, and other right-brain folks, while losers will be lawyers, engineers, accountants, and other left-brainers who will see their jobs migrate across the Pacific. There’s also, of course, C.K. Prahalad’s terrific book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers.

If you still harbor doubts about what’s happening, check out the job boards of two of my favorite design sites: idsa.org and core77.com. The Industrial Designers Society of America runs one of the best design contests in the world (which BusinessWeek supports and publishes the results of every June) and core77 is one of the coolest, most informative design sites around.

RISING TO THE TOP. In December of last year, ZIBA Design in Portland, Ore., a top design consultancy, ran an ad for a “visualization specialist.” ZIBA advertised itself as “an international design consultancy that helps companies create meaningful ideas, designs, and experiences that customers crave.” It says it’s a company driven by an obsession “for understanding people, brands and technology.” “ZIBA innovates with soul.” Is that heuristic enough for you?

That same month, Palo Alto (Calif.)-based IDEO (see BW, 5/17/04, “The Power of Design”) ran an ad for a conceptual designer. It read: “You bring…a holistic approach to process: Formulating cultural and user insights, mapping opportunity spaces through strategic frameworks, and expressing compelling solutions.” Ask yourself this: Who in your company at this moment is mapping out opportunity spaces through strategic frameworks?

Smart CEOs are turning to this kind of design thinking to guide them to the new land. ZIBA, IDEO, and other design firms are in great demand. Increasingly, design thinking is making its way up to “C” suite levels inside corporations, with chief creative officer, chief innovation officer, or even chief customer officer joining the organization table. Sometimes, design thinking goes all the way to the top.

SHAPING CONSUMER EXPERIENCE. Think about what GE Healthcare Technologies (GE ) CEO Joseph M. Hogan has to say about the future of his business. Hogan wrote in @issue: The Journal of Business & Design: “Today, when we think about designing, say, a new MRI system, we don’t just think about designing the product, we think about designing the whole radiology suite. Design in the next 10 years will move beyond the product. It will move beyond workflow. Hospitals in the future…will have different ways of interacting with the patient. We have to think about setting the course for how design can affect the whole health-care experience.”

Patient experience. Consumer experience. Take Hogan’s template and apply it to the U.S. economy, and you can see where we’re going. Now, how many of you have looked up the word “heuristic” yet?

Overview of this Atricle: There is an ongoing debate about exactly what “design thinking” is and specifically about the term “design thinking”.  This article brings up a few of the perspectives.

Thoughts on this Article: Bruce does a good job of getting to the point:  Stop focusing on what it is called and go do it!

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on July 10 on BusinessWeek

Fred Collopy has a great blog item up at Fast Company on why he dislikes the “Thinking” part of the term “Design Thinking.” In essence, Fred argues that the best part of design is the “doing,” not the thinking and the focus on Design Thinking short-changes what designers can really do in education, health and other spaces outside their traditional consumer-oriented activities.

As an early proponent and major supporter of Design Thinking, I can only say “Amen” to Fred. I totally agree. It is the ability to create new options and build new products, services and experiences that gives design so much power. It is the ability to understand deeply cultures from digital social media networks to small villages in southern India that gives design its power.

And finally, it is the evolution of design into Design (with or without the “Thinking” term) to redesign large scale social systems in business and civic society that has folks moving to embrace it. In this era of melting models and flaming careers, of economic uncertainty and social volatility, Design has a set of tools and methods that can guide people to new solutions.

Which is why MIT, Harvard, Rotman, McKinsey and dozens of corporations are moving to Design to help navigate the present and the future. It is why in Britain and the Continental governments are embracing Design to help redesign basic social services.

And it is why the World Economic Forum has invited me to join a new GAC–Global Agenda Council on Designing Large Scale Social Systems.

The truth is that despite the clumsiness of the term Design Thinking, there is no limitation to the Doing in the Design Thinking. It is a way of thinking about doing on a strategically big scale–a new learning experience for all children, a better health-care experience for older people, a more honest political system for voters.

The very best analysis of the failure of business schools and the new for management to embrace design principles is Shoshana Zuboff’s remarkable essay on the failure of business school education. A professor at Harvard Business School for 25 years, Zuboff says that the focus on the company and how to make it more efficient is being replaced by a focus on the consumer, the learner, the patient, the individual.

Transaction is being replaced by relationship as the source of value in business. Design’s anthropological focus (its “user-focus”) and its ability to iterate and generate new things off the knowledge about from that anthropological perspective are the powerful tools attracting CEOs, NGOs, and Politicos.

It would be tragic for designers to turn their back on Design just when society is embracing it just because of a dispute over terminology. So Fred, forget the nomenclature. Call it a a banana and let’s get on with helping our society redesign itself.