Design Management - Education (since The 2010s)

Education (since The 2010s)

Design management is usually first taught at business school. Teaching design to managers was pioneered at the London Business School in 1976, and the first programme of design management at a design school was started in the 1980s at the Royal College of Art (RCA), DeMontfort, Middlesex, Staffordshire. Although, in the UK, some design management courses have not been sustainable, including those at the RCA, Westminster and Middlesex, other postgraduate courses have flourished including ones at Brunel, Lancaster and Salford with each providing a specific point of view on design management.

The BusinessWeek annually publishes a lists of the best programmes that combine design thinking and business thinking (D-schools 2009 and D-school Programmes to Watch 2009). The article Finland – World´s Innovation Hot Spot in the Harvard Business Review shows the interest of business leaders in the blended education of design and management. Business Schools (such as the Rotman School of Management, Wharton University of Pennsylvania and MIT Sloan Executive Education) have acted on this interest and developed new academic curricula.

Integrated education models are emerging in the academic world, a model which is referred to as T-shape and π-shaped education. T-shaped professionals are taught general knowledge in a few disciplines (e.g. management and engineering) and specific, deep knowledge in a single domain (e.g. design). This model also applies to companies, when they shift their focus from small T innovations (innovations involving only one discipline, like chemists) to big T innovations (innovations involving several disciplines, like design, ethnography, lead user, etc.). Like in education, this shift makes breaking down silos of departments and disciplines of knowledge essential.