Sauder’ s d.studio is where business meets design at the University of British Columbia.
Moura Quayle joined the Sauder School of Business at UBC in July 2009 in order to introduce design thinking into the business curriculum. However, she found that it is was necessary to position design thinking as part of overall thinking strategies – both critical and creative thinking. New learning environments need to be created in which thinking strategies can be practiced in the context of real world clients and projects.
Enter the business studio. Such places are springing up all over globally – change labs (Adam Kahane), design labs (Helsinki), studio@CBS (Copenhagen Business School), Design Works (Rotman) and now the d.studio (Sauder). In essence they are all places of praxis and innovation where students practice convergent and divergent thinking using a design process. The business studio opens opportunities for different business learning styles—both at school and in the workplace. In the d.studio business students engage in projects that meld the various bottom lines: economic, environmental, and social.
The d.studio has experimented with embedding diverse ways of thinking into the MBA curriculum, as well as pioneering a new business learning model in the undergraduate program. Student teams worked closely in Fall 2010 with four client groups to tackle challenging business problems. Armed with student evaluations from these experiences, as well as a series of writings from past research work in writing processes, in making public ideas happen and in bridging policy gaps, we are continuing to gather data on the effectiveness of these models in the business school environment.
The initiative aims to integrate design and thinking strategies into the business school by implementing several inter-connected initiatives:
- Undergraduate students explore design and thinking strategies in a business studio-style class.
- MBA faculty work to embed the concept into the integrated core program classes.
- Design@UBC will enable an inclusionary trans-disciplinary dialogue at UBC that will allow practitioners in different fields to reach a common understanding of the areas where overlap takes place in design.
- As part of Sauder’s strategic alliance with the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), research and teaching partnerships are growing – for example, two PhD Fellows from CBS are coming to Sauder to co-teach an MBA module on “Creative Business Thinking: A Nordic Approach”.
Sauder’s remarkable commitment to this initiative reflects the school’s determination to evolve its learning model in order to better educate tomorrow’s leaders.
