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the environment," says Hershauer. "They're facing complex problems that require interdisciplinary approaches to solve." Design-oriented curricula that reach beyond the business school and across functional disciplines will be "the next stage of business education," agrees Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management and a champion of busi- ness design. "It's not enough to stick to the traditional ap- proaches in business education, plain and simple," he says. "By using design thinking—or integrated thinking—stu- dents learn not only how to choose well between existing models, but to create new models altogether." Business schools have taken this message to heart. Schools like Carnegie Mellon, University of Texas at Aus- tin, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered the first design courses in the early 1990s. Schools like Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley have established design-based innovation labs and programs in the last few years. The Zollverwein School of Management and Design in Essen, Germany, launched its International MBA in Business Design in 2005. But its interdisciplinary approach already has attracted the attention of other educators interested in business design. Its curriculum is based on five thematic ar- eas: transformation, methodology, strategy and marketing, organization and leadership, and finance and operations. The transformation theme, which covers design, culture, and society, runs through the entire degree program, explains Annekatrin Sonn, director of Zollverwein's communications office. "Because of their empathetic skills, professionals with creative training can identify customer needs and transform these needs into innovative products and services," says Sonn. "They can anticipate future developments more ac- curately than even the best market research studies." The Tanaka Business School at Imperial College in the United Kingdom is also betting on design, taking part in Design-London, a new £5.8 million center that brings together design, engineering, and business. Launched in October, the center will accept its first student cohort in October 2008. Design-London will include an incubator where multi- disciplinary student teams will create new concepts and a simulator where they can test those concepts in real-world scenarios, explains David Gann, head of innovation and en- trepreneurship at Tanaka. "All students in our innovation management courses complete experiential learning projects in innovation strategy and entrepreneurship," says Gann. "Now they'll do the same in design." In the future, more and more companies will look to innovation as an essential part of their long-term survival in a competitive global market, say educators in business design. And they'll look to business schools for graduates who know what it takes to innovate: patient observation, energetic experimentation, and open-minded collaboration across the disciplines. ■ z BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 31