Design in business education--a square peg in a round world?

Design Management Journal, Summer 2002 by Lockwood, Thomas

THE BIG PICTURE

Studying curricula and interviewing selected deans and faculty at some of America's most respected business schools, Tom Lockwood reluctantly concludes that design is simply not on the MBA map. Higher-priority subject matter, accreditation criteria, and theories of education that make it hard to focus on design contribute to this reality. Fortunately, Lockwood identifies trends that suggest things may be better in the years to come.

Have you ever wondered what Apple design might be like without the inspiration and leadership of CEO Steve Jobs? Or considered what OXO design might be like without CEO Sam Farber's commitment to design?

Could Chrysler have made the design statements that helped put them back on the automotive map in the 1990s, without former CEO Robert Lutz's full commitment to cross-functional design excellence? Or could FedEx's integrated design systems deliver results without CEO Fred Smith driving organizational design? Could the fashionably hot positioning of "Target design" have been launched without the leadership of CEO Bob Ulrich? Microsoft user interface design is consistent across all products and all business units because, well, Bill Gates wants it that way. Starbucks looks, feels, and tastes like, right, Starbucks, because of CEO Howard Schultz's commitment to unilateral design.

My point is that it takes a designsmart CEO and senior management team to drive design-mindedness and design effectiveness throughout an organization. We enlightened designers may do our best to introduce and integrate design, but without senior-level organizational commitment to design, those ideas will never reach their full potential.

In other words, design effectiveness depends on the business minds. Which made me wonder: What are the business students-our future business leaders-being taught about design in US graduate business schools today?

One would expect to find design closely integrated into business-school curricula, equipping those business leaders who will make important design and design management decisions during their careers. Learners can only construct new ideas by using the knowledge and skills they already have, according to constructivist learning theory (see sidebar). So we would expect business schools to give students at least the basics of design in order to prepare them for the kinds of future design decisions management will require.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Design is not included in business education curriculum

In my MBA/design management thesis on the role of design in business education, I interviewed faculty at 15 of the top 30 US business schools and studied the schools' accreditation requirements and curriculum content. When asked whether their programs' curricula included design, design management, creativity, or innovation, curriculum deans and professors responded with answers like, "No. It might be buried in there somewhere, but we are not an art school. We teach about finance, marketing, quantitative economics-not design." Or, "No. But a tad on Web-site design, in one class." Or even, "No. You can't measure creativity (or design). So you can't control it. You don't study what you can't control."

In other words, the role of design in business education was minimal at best, at least in my sample. It was not a part of the primary curriculum, either core or elective (see table). I found no courses dedicated to design management, design strategy, design in business, corporate identity, graphic design, communications design, environmental design, or product design.2 As one MBA curriculum chair said, "Design is not even on the radar screen." If business students are exposed to principles of design at all, they learn it tangentially, as a part of a class on entrepreneurship or new-product development (see table on next page).

It is as if business educators assume that when it comes time for corporate design decisions to be made, their graduates will simply ask a designer. But just as business managers are not taught design, designers are not taught business. So current education strategies produce a knowledge and communication gap between the two fields.

But once we step out of academia and into industry, design and business must have a symbiotic relationship to stay competitive. As we have seen with corporations like Apple, Chrysler, FedEx, and Starbucks, designs that keep in step with customer preferences cannot retain their integrity through production phases or appear consistent across all the multiple customer contact points unless the corporation's top business minds place a high priority on design innovation and management.

Academic resistance to the real-world importance of design

In excluding design from the curriculum, business schools are out of touch with realworld business. So why don't they change their curricula to target real-world business needs? After consulting with experts on business education, examining accreditation and curriculum requirements, and reviewing journal articles and books on the current standards and process of business education, I found several reasons.