When worlds collide: Integrated development with business and design students

Design Management Journal, Summer 2002 by Rothstein, Paul

COURSES

Interdisciplinary development teams have emerged as a key to stimulating organizational creativity. However, Paul Rothstein has discovered in a course he teaches on the subject, with three other colleagues, that making such collaboration work is a demanding task, especially as business and design student perceptions about and openness to this approach change as they experience the process.

As one of the world's largest and most innovative design consultants, Palo Alto-based IDEO has a scrapbook of award-winning designs the size of the Manhattan phone directory. In the 11 years of its existence, the company has left its mark with a range of products, from grocery-shopping carts, the Apple mouse, and Polaroid's I-Zone instant cameras to Palm handheld personal digital assistants. Not content to operate solely within familiar terrain, IDEO has even ventured into territory that most design firms just dream about-- the design and manufacture of its own highly technical consumer-electronics products. How do they do it? "Teams are the heart of the IDEO method," writes general manager Tom Kelley in his book, The Art of Innovation. "It's no accident. We believe it's how innovation and much of business take place in the world. Quite simply, great projects are achieved by great teams."1

In recent years, American businesses have rushed to implement their own strategies for product development and design, spurred on by the spectacular successes of companies such as IDEO, as well as by the steady flow of books and articles extolling the virtues of cross-functional teams in an integrated development process (IDP). Research has shown that enormous benefits are derived from a close collaboration among the marketing, design, engineering, and communications sectors of a company. Project managers have found this approach better connects development teams to consumers' needs and values. It effectively leverages the experience and expertise of an organization's human resources. It lowers development costs while improving results. And most important, it generates creative solutions that can provide an edge in a highly competitive global market.

But in the transition to this new way of working, companies have hit a few bumps in the road. Many of the difficulties can be traced to an overall unpreparedness for the complexities that are inherent in the IDP approach. Take the dynamics of teamwork, for example. "Given the popular interest and participation in team sports and our historical traditions of democratic governance and collective action, teamwork could be expected to develop easily, naturally," observes business professor Anne Donnellon in a 1993 article in the Journal of Product Innovation Management. But after a close study of four US companies, Donnellon recognized a disturbing "disparity between the ideal and the real" adding that "anecdotal evidence is beginning to suggest that companies, teams, and individuals are finding the transition to teams very slow and very painful"2 All too often, Donnellon discovered, businesses underestimated the dramatic attitudinal changes, not to mention organizational restructuring, that are necessary for working effectively in a multidisciplinary group.

Also lacking is the expertise to conduct qualitative research. For example, even though many product-development consultants advertise the ability to conduct user-centered field research, they struggle behind the scenes to find qualified candidates to carry it out. This results in development programs that are handicapped by an absence of critical information about people and everyday experience.

For the most part, educational institutions do little to address these critical workplace deficiencies. This is slowly changing, however. In the mid 1990s, for example, at the Corporate Design Foundation conference Teaching Collaborative Product Development, presenters from 15 institutions (including the University of Michigan, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Rhode Island School of Design) described new coursework that had been developed to bring together students from business, engineering, and design. Since then, faculty members at several universities, including Carnegie Mellon University and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, have gone one step further to incorporate active research programs into integrated design and planning methodologies.

The classroom as training ground and research lab

Support from Thomson multimedia, Inc. (Tmm) has enabled me not only to introduce students at Arizona State University to an integrated development process (see figure 1) using cross-functional teams, but also to utilize my classroom as a laboratory in which to study the perils and promises of this innovative approach to product development and design. In fall 2000, 16 senior-level students, who were evenly divided among ASU's College of Business and School of Design (including industrial and graphic design), participated in a class offered by ASU's School of Design, which focused on the theme Recreating the Shopping Experience. Students were charged with exploring the values and behaviors of various types of shoppers and then developing and communicating innovative business and design solutions to support them (see figures 2, 3, and 4). The class was repeated in the fall 2001 semester, with the main assignment refocused on Creating Brands for the D-generation (D standing for "digital"). This challenge involved developing creative business strategies-- supported by bundles of new product, media, communication, and environmental concepts (see figure 5)-to connect Tmm with a user group (tech-savvy teens and young adults) that it traditionally ignored.