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3.10.06

D-Schools and B-Schools

A recent article in the BusinessWeek illustrates examples of a design-approach towards innovation. I personally think that designers offer great value to the innovation process. But not only to innovation, also strategy can benefit from an approach that is dialogue-based, issue-driven and permanently adapts to the fast changing environment. For this reason, tf consulting named his strategy unit “strategy design”.

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.

A while ago, I posted an article by Jeanne Liedtka, who sees design as the new metaphor for strategy. Not by surprise, Liedtka works at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, one of the leading D-Schools mentioned in the BW-article.

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