BusinessWeek recently published a great piece about the growing trend of using design thinking as a means to teach people how to innovate. I'm particularly proud that the Mozilla project from the Creating Infectious Action class I co-taught with Bob Sutton is the lead story in the article:
Tech geeks love Mozilla's Firefox browser, which is impervious to most viruses, but mainstream America has yet to embrace it. How does Mozilla move beyond invention (cool browser, neat functions) to an innovation that translates into market success (a Net tool so hot it upends Microsoft's Corp.'s Explorer)? It's a perfect problem for a classroom case study. So last spring, Mozilla's business development team turned to Stanford University. But instead of going to the business school, they headed for the double-wide trailer that housed Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, dubbed the "D-school" on campus. The course was team-taught by Stanford profs and industry professionals. Each student worked in a team that included a B-schooler, a computer science major, and a product designer. And each team used design thinking to shape a business plan for Mozilla.
It made a big difference. A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them. Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers. B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.
This is a great overview of both the class we taught and the philosophy behind it. There's a big difference between knowing how to analyze a business situation versus knowing how to create and execute on a business innovation problem. For more on what we did in the class, here's a post I wrote earlier this year, and best of all is this post by Bob Sutton, which rightfully celebrates the students from the class.
One thing I'd like to make clear is that I'm not anti-MBA. Far from it. I value my management education a great deal, and believe that an MBA provides individuals with very useful set of analytical tools, as well as the ability to thin-slice most business situations. However, I do think that the typical MBA program is mostly focused on becoming a master of business-as-usual, which is a critical body of knowledge when it comes to running a profitable organization. One way (and the best way, I believe) to learn how to engage in innovative behavior is to become a master of business-by-design, and that's what we're doing in our Business + Design classes at the Stanford d.school. Organizations need to know how to do both. And those organizations need doers and innovators who can bridge the worlds of business-as-usual and business-by-design.
