Using design to change management education: radical innovation vs entertaining facelift

Design has assumed so far a central role in management, both as a key competence used by designers to boost the process of product innovation (Von Stamm, 2004; Brown, 2009; Martin, 2009; Lockwood, 2010; Verganti, 2003) and as a point of critical re-alignment of the management discourse (Bruce, Bessant, 2002; Boland, Collopy, 2004; Seidel, Fixson, 2013). A new interest then emerged on the intersection between innovation and design (Carlgren, Rauth, and Elmquist, 2016), in the attempt to imagine the right place for a competence that is now included in the list of strategic tools (Dunne, Martin, 2006), confirming the idea of Simon (1969) about “the design process as a means of approaching managerial problems” (Dunne, Martin, 2006, 512). Notwithstanding its relevance, the role of design remains ambiguous, whereas it has been adopted in many different ways (Landoni et al., 2016). The use of the word “design” in the field of management research produced a long list of labels, starting from the end of the ‘eighties (Dumas, Mintzberg, 1989; 1991) and increasing progressively at the end of the previous century (Hargadon, Sutton 1997; Boland, Collopy, 2004; Verganti, 2003; 2006; Utterback et al., 2006; Hatchuel, Le Masson, and Weil, 2002). In parallel, the world of professional designers gave start to a massive process of communication, exhibiting its own methods and proposing the best practices and an approach to introduce design as a means of change in the organisation (Brown, 2008; 2009; Martin, 2009). The debate on the role of design is then open, and new tensions emerge between designers and managers, and their respective models and frameworks. Moving on the fuzzy frontiers among these different perspectives, this work is aimed at discussing the role of design as a driver of change in management education. The world of consultancy already developed a number of “design thinking” (Brown, 2009) tools, used to introduce a substantial facelift in the process of training, often supporting the launch of new ideas in terms of products and entrepreneurial processes and offering unforeseen perspectives to the field of interdisciplinary projects. Nevertheless, two major problems emerge. As a first point, management education still uses a set of approaches and keywords that are substantially and radically incongruent with the inner essence of a design attitude (Boland, Collopy, 2004). As a second point, the adoption of design thinking techniques is culturally rooted in the Silicon Valley, a context that is quite different from the European culture, thus asking for a critical reflection on its customisation and adaption. Given these premises, this work is the result of an experiment of teaching where design has been used to introduce a set of small but critical changes in the process of learning of a class of management students. The paper reports the emerging evidences of an experiment where a class of Innovation and Design Management students, attending the first year of a Marketing Master program, are induced to adopt a design attitude (Boland, Collopy, 2004). The experiment is built around two major aims. The first aim is that of using a design concept, which identifies both a set of practices and conceptual tools to find the best possible solution to human needs but also a process of making sense and interpreting the process. The second aim is that of defining a set of learning strategies that fit better the social and cultural context in which they find their application. The experiment run with the 58 students of the Design and Innovation Management class was based on three different processes of learning, all based on the co-presence of an academic professor and a “design thinking” consultant: Monica Calcagno, Daniela Pavan - Department of Management, Ca’ Foscari University - in-class lectures on the theory of design and innovation management where students are given the theoretical basis to critically analyze the emergence of design as a key term in the innovation field of research; - weekly labs (action Fridays), where students have the chance to experience design thinking methodologies in class, together with other practical activities aimed at reducing their cognitive biases (Liedtka, 2015); - a workgroup where students are involved in the analysis of actual and future “customers” of four cultural and creative organizations operating in the urban area of Venice. Here students are asked to apply a typical process of design thinking, in a context of practice where processes of sense making are pivotal to the process of value creation for the people involved as users and producers. The entire process has been observed and monitored by a third part, a researcher involved in the ethnographic study of the process of change induced, observing the effects of the experimentation on the managerial competence of the students. The work then discusses the effects produced in the process of learning, trying to identify the borders of the “middle hearth” (Calcagno, 2013) where design and management interact and their effect in terms of a new model of teaching matching the needs of management in the future.