Crain’s notes that Business Week this week names the Cleveland Institute of Art one of world’s top design schools, while the Financial Times runs an article on how MBA programs are increasingly using design classes to help their students be more innovative. 

Out of modesty we won’t make too much of the fact that all this was pointed to in the TechFutures scenarios and in the resulting report (well, that wasn’t too much, was it?), what really intrigues us is what’s going on at Case Western Reserve’s Weatherhead School of Management, where rumor has it (actually, much more than rumor) that staff is reviewing the curriculum with an eye towards introducing the notion of management as design as a core concept. 

With the Cleveland Institute of Art right next door, the possibilities are extremely exciting–CIA students have long turned to Case for their “non-design” courses.  If Weatherhead is serious about make design a central tenent of how they teach management, then the school may well be able to carve out an exciting and necessary niche for itself in a degree program that has been showing signs of weakness and age at all schools that offer the traditional MBA degree.  As noted in the FT article, “it is a great thing for a design school to live in a time when the business world is realizing the importance of design, creativity, and innovation.”  Even more exciting is a business school that embraces design as a core aspect of good management.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Strategy, Education, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.