Design Thinking

IDEO colleague Ryan Jacoby has recently started a great blog about business design at do_matic. His post on a 2012 curriculum for a degree in business design is genius. Judging from the early response there seem to be plenty of people like me who would love to sign up. This looks like the education I wish I had had as a designer. The only problem is I think I would have needed my seven years in art school to accumulate some of the skills necessary to consider applying to Ryan’s program.

The thorny issue is how do design thinkers get the breadth and depth of education they need to tackle the systemic problems that face us?

Do we start with depth, a more traditional undergraduate degree in industrial design or engineering let’s say, and then follow it with the breadth in the form of Ryan’s Masters in Business Design? Or maybe it needs to be the other way around. A great liberal arts degree with business design as a major followed by the depth building experience of a more traditional design masters. I suspect that neither of these proves to be the ideal recipe and that we need many more varied paths to accumulate knowledge and experience.

I popped into BusinessWeek a few days ago so that they could interview me for their “Five Questions” series. I spent most of my time talking about design thinking.

I am just heading over to Tianjin for the Summer Davos conference where there are several sessions touching on design and design thinking as well as interesting sessions on clean energy and innovation for aging. The focus of the summer version of the famous gathering in Davos, Switzerland, is on what the WEF calls the Global Growth Companies. These are the next generation of fast growing companies, many of them hailing from China, India, South America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. It is these corporations that are likely to become the global 100 of the future. Given all the furor in the financial markets this week it remains to be seen how much attention design gets but there is no doubt that the GGC companies realize the need to build world class design and innovation capabilities.

I met with the Chairman of one of the fastest growing companies in China yesterday and he made it clear that their highest priority is to build internal design and design thinking talent and that he is looking for help in doing this. Almost certainly the biggest obstacle will be the supply of raw talent. Big investments are being made in Singapore and China around design education but it will likely take a lot more to supply just the demand in China. I am interested in trying to identify where  the interesting experiments are in design education in Asia? Are there equivalents to the Standford D-school or the IIT design program?