Design and the future of business education

This refers to the Forbes article on the future of business strategy and the need to integrate design thinking [See article titled “Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen Are Both Wrong About Finding the Future of Business Education” by Marty Neumeier; dated 12 June 2014]. Also see discussions initiated by Alfredo M. @Design Management Institute: Should design be part of business strategy education? NOTE: As suggested by one discussant “Fortune 500 businesses, national security, governance, energy....and heath care constituents, can all use Design Methodology which is an accessible design thinking framework.” [Steve B., Director of Strategic Planning and Design at Abrams Learning and Information Systems, Inc.]

Here are some excerpts from the Forbes article by M. Neumeier:

• Porter’s argument for building an integrated brand is that copycats would have to recreate the whole brand to compete with Harvard’s online program. “Any competitor wishing to imitate a strategy,” he says, “must replicate a whole system.” Yet copycats are rarely the biggest threat to leading brands. The real threat is more likely to come from purpose-built organizations, unencumbered by legacy beliefs, that correctly imagine the future of education. They wouldn’t bother replicating Harvard’s system. They would render it irrelevant.
• This is where Christensen is strong. He knows that education is ripe for disruption, saying that “half of the United States’ universities could face bankruptcy in 15 years.” Necessarily, his approach is opposed to Porter’s.
• Christensen would set up the [online education] program as an independent business unit, allowing it to learn from experience without the need for immediate profits or slavish brand alignment. He sees innovation as something that unfolds over time on the public stage: You put out a cheap product that serves an unmet need, get some traction with it, improve it, begin to raise the price, and meanwhile start looking for your next disruptive innovation. It’s a Darwinian, way-of-the-world model of competition. What it doesn’t acknowledge is the potential of design to speed up this evolution, all the while keeping hard-won learning—and embarrassing mistakes—out of the public eye. Design can create disruptive innovation much faster and much more surely than a thousand monkeys with a thousand dry-erase markers. And it shouldn’t take a thousand years, or even a thousand days, with a talented team. 
• This [article] does not lessen the valued contributions of Porter and Christensen. Both professors are lighthouse figures in the world of business strategy. The Times simply used them to illuminate an irony—that the leading school for business strategy can’t agree on its own strategy. But there’s a bigger point. Their shining contributions lead straight to the need for design, not just in products and services, but in business models, organizational culture, and, yes, strategy.   

Also see: Design Thinking @SAP – Lessons for India

[NOTE: The highlighted text is based on the definitions of creativity, innovation and design in the book Design in Business by Bruce and Bessant; where design is defined as the purposive application of creativity throughout the process of innovation]