Design Driven Innovation

I met Roberto Verganti at the Redesigning Business conference in London back in March.   He graciously agreed to meet with me when I was visiting Milan a couple of weeks ago.  Roberto is a Professor of Management of Innovation at Politecnico di Milano, where he teaches at the School of Management, at the School of Design, and in the Doctoral Program in Management.   He is the author of the 2009 book Design Driven Innovation.

This is a wonderful photo of Roberto — very business.  But when I met him (and I now regret not asking to take his picture) he was sporting wonderful and colourful plaid trousers.  Not a typical business prof look.

Claudio Ell’Era, a researcher in Roberto’s MaDe In Lab (Management of Design and Innovation) also joined our meeting.

Roberto identified 3 ways to describe how design and business interact in Business Schools.

1.  Marketing — the aesthetics of products, branding — the intangibles;

2.  Innovation Management — his example was the IDEO shopping cart example and design as a problem-solving process; and,

3.  Leadership and Organization — design thinking, making managers more creative.

Roberto’s work in the Politecnico di Milano is in the area of Innovation.  The MaDe In Lab is about the Management of Design and Innovation.  To quote Roberto:

The MaDe In Lab believes that the interaction and integration of marketing, design and innovation is paramount for the development and growth of firms in turbulent and highly competitive business environments.

Roberto says one of the big questions is:  how to bring design to managers?  There are some challenges – how to use the language of business, how to use practical examples that business people and business students can relate to and how to balance the theoretical and the pragmatic in knowledge management.

He explained to me that he brings together the industrial designers and the business students from the Politecnica.  But he has to be careful when inviting the design teachers to talk to business students — there is a language barrier.  So this is something that I need to be very conscious of — how to speak the language of business while introducing the possibilities of new ways of thinking.

I have asked most of the people I interviewed about whether a course exists in their business schools around “types of thinking” or “ways of thinking”.  I haven’t found one yet with this explicit goal — however many courses, obviously, touch on this topic.

One of his most interesting comments was his sense that there are not many professors doing research in the area of design + business — which makes it more difficult to establish the area inside of research-intensive b-schools.  This was a theme through our discussion — you need a team doing research that brings examples and new information to the learning environment.  His research lab undertakes a variety of research streams under Managing Design Driven Innovation:

• Distributed Innovation — networks, social networks, open innovation
• Strategy of Innovation — technology push, market pull (user-centered design); and design push (design driven innovation)
• Management of Innovation — innovation typologies, innovation characteristics, innovation dynamics
• Product design — product semiotics, product semantics

I am about to read Roberto’s Book — Design Driven Innovation.  Always easier to read when you have met the author and you can “hear” their voice.