Teaching Design in Business

By Dominique Trempont, Guest Author

I have always been attracted by well designed products, well thought through customer experience in service and great user experience in software. I wonder why so many organizations do not take more cues from superbly well designed offerings. In an economy where design is king and drives brand differentiation and price premium, we better all learn to integrate design and creativity in our business. This is especially true in consumer facing businesses. It is also true in the emerging prosumer category, professionals that buy products and services they use at work, in travel or at home.

Great design is the creative visual thinking process that gets to a deep understanding of user needs colliding with a breakthrough creative idea and a slew of trade-offs. Great design in products offers an irresistible new functionality in an aesthetically pleasing form factor.

How do we make this crucial leadership element part of every company?

INSEAD is the leading international business school with closely connected campuses in France and in Singapore. For full disclosure, I went to that business school and sit on their advisory board.

INSEAD wanted to teach how to think creatively, how to design new products and services. It sealed a strategic partnership with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. They offer a joint program that teaches the role of creativity in business decisions, how innovation really works and why design is important in corporate management today.

Students are divided into project teams, each with a design student and several MBAs. The teams develop a new product idea in an INSEAD design studio and do 3D rapid prototyping and brainstorming. These teams are taught to focus on consumer needs, visualize ideas via prototypes, and market test their concepts. They operate on a deadline. The second step is to present to angel investors. The third step is for the teams to fly to The Art Center College where they finalize the designs and benchmark their designs with key designers at Walt Disney Imagineering, BMW, Nokia and Idealab in Los Angeles.

This is, to my knowledge the first joint venture between a business school and a design school, to train business leaders in putting together creative teams, and manage creativity as a vital element in their business lives.