Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/57872
From the Editors I ♥ My Mug Let me tell you about my mug. Used for all my daily beverage needs, my glass mug has soft swirls of white and blue swooping through it. Its smooth sides curve gently inward, providing the perfect place for my hand to grasp. Sparkling grooves adorn the points where the elegant handle meets the glass. In case you couldn't tell, I love my mug. I stumbled upon it accidentally at a flea market years ago; I purchased it as an afterthought. But after I used it once, it was all over. This mug would not be rel- egated to the back of the kitchen cabinet. It would be used frequently and with pleasure. I wish I knew the artist who made this master- piece. He or she did a fine job. That's the power of great design. The question is, if great design can inspire an ode to joy for a common household object, what can it do for a business? A great deal, according to some business educators. The tools and collaborative processes embraced in the design world can help an organization adopt elegant busi- ness models that inspire fierce loyalty and devotion among its customers and staff. As a result, courses in "design think- ing" are becoming important parts of the curricula at a growing number of business schools. In these courses, business students collaborate with students from engi- neering, design, and other disciplines to find unrecog- nized needs in the market and develop innovative ways to meet them. In the process, they're learning to appre- ciate diverse new perspectives and embrace an exciting array of possibilities. Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Manage- ment at the University of Toronto in Canada, sees such interdisciplinary inte- gration and design-based curricula as "important for the next stage of business education." Martin and other educators believe that it will be the students with business savvy, design smarts, and collaborative skills who'll be best prepared to help organizations stay ahead of the trends and succeed in the midst of rampant global competition. After all, I never knew I needed a blue-swirled glass mug, just as our coun- terparts in the 1970s never knew they needed the Internet. By combining their talents, designers, engineers, and business leaders can envision solutions that we haven't even dreamed of yet. And, of course, once these design-minded innovators take their best ideas to market, we'll wonder how we ever lived without them. ■ z 6 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 BILL BASCOM