NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN
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Business Design Academy: Understanding the New Zollverein School
Professor Dr. Ralph Bruder Founding President, Zollverein School of Management and Design
GK VanPatter Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute Co-Founder, Humantific Making Sense of Cross-Disciplinary Innovation
NextDesign Leadership Institute DEFUZZ THE FUTURE! www.nextd.org Follow NextD Journal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nextd Copyright © 2006 NextDesign Leadership Institute. All Rights Reserved. NextD Journal may be quoted freely with proper reference credit. If you wish to repost, reproduce or retransmit any of this text for commercial use please send a copyright permission request to journal@nextd.org
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1 GK VanPatter: Welcome Ralph. Congrats on the launch of your new school there in Germany. Numerous educators here in North America are talking about creating hybrid combination business/design graduate programs in existing institutions but you seem to have jumped ahead and created the first dedicated graduate business/design school. It’s wonderful to see such experiments! Can you tell us something about how Zollverein School of Management and Design got started and what its purpose is? Ralph Bruder: Thank you, GK. The whole project of founding a new school started in 1999 as part of a larger program to transform a former coal mining complex in the western part of Germany into a leading international location for design, art and culture. This coal mine (named Zeche Zollverein) is very special for the region, not least because it became part of the UNESCO World Heritage list in December, 2001, and is a symbol of the rise and fall of a complete industrial branch. But also Zollverein represents the necessity for an imaginative restart in an area with a high rate of unemployment. So the European Union, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the city of Essen decided to give a total of 110 million euros from 2002-2007 to not only preserve the historic place, but to revitalize it with a focus on creative businesses. In 1999, the idea was born that a new school is needed at the Zollverein area that can work as a stimulator for creating new jobs in the so-called creative business sector. The following three years were spent writing proposals to get public funding, creating a network of academics and practitioners to support the idea of the school and looking for an appropriate organizational structure for this new school. Finally in December, 2003, the Zollverein School of Management and Design was founded as a private institution for teaching and doing research in the field of business and design. The purpose of the Zollverein School is to create a platform for the mutual exchange between the often separated fields of business and design. At the Zollverein School, managers become familiar with the views and ways of thinking of designers or architects and vice versa. Both sides move away from their traditional viewpoints and link their activities to create innovative and sustainable strategies for future businesses. What makes the Zollverein School very special and unique is that it is neither a business school nor a design school, but rather an institution where those different disciplines define a space of mutual respect.
2 GK VanPatter: When did you enroll your first students and when will your first crop of students graduate? Ralph Bruder: We enrolled our first students February 2005 and they will graduate officially September 2006 (that means some of them will finish their Master Thesis in July 2006). The second group of students started March 2006 and will graduate October 2007.
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3 GK VanPatter: It sounds like you are defining “management” and “design” in the broadest of terms. Is that correct? Ralph Bruder: Yes, absolutely. At the Zollverein School management is not restricted to the administration of day-to-day tasks in companies, but is seen as a design task. Traditional economic theory assumes that every management task can be summed up in a problem that can be clearly defined and for which an optimal solution can be found. As a result of the increasing global competition on deregulated markets, this theory (which works on stable, growing markets) has long reached its limitations. Existing methods of business management must therefore be developed in order to establish new rules of competition, draft new business models, and create new markets. And that is what we call a design task. Design is all about finding solutions for abstract, vague problems, and making decisions – and not just analyzing situations. But with this growing interest, design as a discipline is facing enormous challenges. Design cannot react to these new challenges if it is reduced to the role of a mere provider of aesthetic solutions for formal problems. So we at the Zollverein School are developing above and beyond design and giving it a new significance. In this context we feel a similarity to your understanding of design, GK. Is that also your impression? We also see a relation to Herbert Simons’s understanding of design as “Science of the Artificial.” This science of the artificial is above all driven by “reflective practitioners” who bring with them the awareness of the problems involved and the experience needed to formulate the relevant questions. The Zollverein School will become a place of interchange for such reflective practitioners from various disciplines. Klaus J. Maack, former CEO of ERCO and a member of our Advisory Board, has formulated the design task of the future as follows: “Our ability to design processes, products, and networks will shape our post-industrial culture.” So when design addresses the shaping of processes, the significance of the design process itself increases. It is not only the result of the design process (e.g., the formal design of products) that must be assessed. We must also ask how effective the cooperation between the players in the design process is, how suitable the capabilities of these players are for the process, where it is possible to rationalize the design process, and where resources are purposefully being saved in individual cases in order to optimize the process as a whole. So you see we really have a broad understanding of management and design.
4 GK VanPatter: We are happy to see many parallels between NextD and the thinking going on at the Zollverein School. You are out there reinventing design in strategic directions that will transport the meaning and purpose of design far beyond product creation. That is so great to see! The truth is Zollverein is the best reinvention example that we have seen so far in the realm of graduate education. What makes it so unusual Page 3 of 16
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is that you seem to be seeking to help reinvent two communities of practice simultaneously. Zollverein looks a lot like Business 3.0 meets Design 3.0! Now that’s am ambitious experiment! What kinds of graduate students are you attracting or attempting to recruit? Ralph Bruder: We are offering only post-graduate and doctoral programs. That means we are looking for students who already have some years of professional experience. They should also have a first academic degree even though the course of study for this degree is of less importance. We are looking for diversity in the disciplinary background and actual professions of our students. The composition of our first group of students who started their Executive MBA program in February, 2005 gives an idea of this multi-disciplinary, multi-professional approach. Within this group of eighteen students we have designers (focused on products, communication or media), architects, economists, and engineers. They are working, for example, as head of a marketing department for an automotive supplier, at consultancies that focus on design strategies or they are running their own businesses. As you can see, we are attracting professionals from the so-called creative industries, but the Zollverein School becomes more and more attractive as well for professionals who have no basic education in any design-related disciplines, but who feel that understanding design processes and adapting design methods might be helpful for their future professional careers. So it is clearly our goal to broaden the mixture of disciplines and professional experiences of future groups of students. As part of the recruitment for this year’s MBA course, we have an application from a young professional responsible for Knowledge Management at Deutsche Telekom (the leading company for telecommunication in Germany) who has a background in the humanities. This application indicates to us that our idea of integrating design thinking in different fields of business is spreading. Besides the diversity in disciplines and professional activities, we also want to attract students with different cultural backgrounds. That is one of the reasons why the Zollverein School has an international orientation. Bringing together management and design is a topic which is not only of interest for certain local economies, but has a global relevance as well.
5 GK VanPatter: Let’s clarify what you mean by graduate and post-graduate degrees because in Europe these terms have different meanings then they do in the US. When you state that you want your applicants to have a degree, are you referring to what is known as an undergraduate degree in the US (and Canada)? Ralph Bruder: In Germany, we use the term post-graduate for those programs which focus on students having a first academic degree (known as an undergraduate degree in the US and Canada). This first academic degree in Germany is typically known as a “diploma degree.” Maybe you have heard about the actual discussion in German universities concerning the transformation of the former diploma degree system into Page 4 of 16
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a bachelor/master system. Referring to this bachelor/master system, we want our applicants to have at least a bachelor degree. In addition to the precondition of having an undergraduate degree, it is characteristic of most post-graduate programs that students within these programs have some years of professional experience. So, for example, the MBA programs in Germany are typically post-graduate programs.
6 GK VanPatter: I see you making reference to an MBA as the degree outcome at Zollverein. Is this the primary degree that you offer? Why wasn’t it called a Master of Design Methods degree, a Master of Innovation Methods degree or something else? Ralph Bruder: We decided to have an MBA degree as the outcome for our first program because it can sometimes be difficult to get accepted in leadership positions, especially for people with a background in design-oriented disciplines. The MBA degree is still valuable for such leadership credentials. But it is not solely because we would like to support the career of our students that we confer MBA degrees. We also feel that the integration of design thinking and design methods into the traditional MBA program is a step towards the oftendemanded reformation of existing MBA programs. (In that sense we feel very much in line with Roger Martin from the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management in Toronto). Nevertheless, we also have core courses in finance as a basic part of the MBA degree in order to be taken seriously in a business context. We will have further programs that focus on finding new solutions for existing problems (or even asking the right questions), and where we will have opportunities to be more open to experiments in teaching. There will be a methodological orientation within such programs in which a Master of Innovation Methods would be a suitable degree. Those programs have some commonalities with the MBA program, and we will have courses and projects where students from the different programs can meet and exchange their perspectives.
7 GK VanPatter: What language are these programs taught in? Ralph Bruder: The Executive MBA is actually taught in English and German. The FullTime MBA will be taught completely in English.
8 GK VanPatter: Help us understand what specifically does the European Union, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the city of Essen expect to get out of their investment of 110 million euros? How did they define the challenge(s) for which the Zollverein School is intended to be a solution?
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Ralph Bruder: The funding from the EU is part of a program to support regions in Europe with a structural weakness. The northern part of the Ruhr area (where Zollverein is located) is such a region where new economic perspectives are urgently needed. The unemployment rate is very high (15-20% in some cities) compared to most other parts of Germany. The EU, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the city of Essen use the Zollverein project as a symbol for the transformation of a former coal-mining area into a new lively place for business in design, culture, education and tourism. It is definitely a goal (and will be a measurement of success) that the Zollverein project directly or indirectly bring new work opportunities to this region. To reach this ambitious goal, four different modules (including the Zollverein School) are supported with a total investment of 110 million euros. •
The Zollverein School of Management and Design
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The Ruhr Museum, which will inform visitors about the history of working and living in this special area, as well as serve as a welcoming and informational portal for the complete Ruhr area. As you can imagine, tourism is of economic interest for a World Heritage-listed industrial complex known (at least in Germany) as one of the most beautiful coal mines of the world. Thus, a task of the Ruhr Museum is to positively stimulate tourism on Zollverein. This new museum will be located in one of the historic buildings (the former coal wash building).
•
Another important element for the development of Zollverein is a world forum for design and architecture called ENTRY2006 which will happen this year for the first time. During the 100 days of ENTRY2006, different exhibitions will be shown (e.g., the “Groundswell” exhibition from MoMA, the “Skin II” exhibition from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum), several workshops will be offered and further events will be organized to build a platform for a discussion about design and how design can (and should) influence our future way of living, working, etc. Dialogue and interdisciplinary thinking are the foundations of ENTRY2006. In addition to architects and designers, multidisciplinary specialists like modellers, market researchers, material experts, engineers, production technicians, sociologists and others are involved.
•
The future focus for Zollverein clearly lies in the domain of design. The proof lies not only in the preparations for ENTRY2006 and the construction of the Zollverein School of Management and Design, but also in the terrain itself, which at this point is marked by large newly-cleared spaces and construction equipment. In the vicinity of the Zollverein School (where until now large portions of flatland meet the eye), a new site for creativity is developing – the Design City Zollverein, a place to work and live within a unique industrial landscape. This new community is expected to provide work for 400 people.
So you see, it is not only the theoretical foundation of the Zollverein School that design thinking benefit the transformation and economic prosperity of companies and even whole regions; we are also directly involved in such a transformation process. Page 6 of 16
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9 GK VanPatter: Around the globe we see many interesting graduate and post-graduate design innovation schools launching. All of them have noble goals and large ambitions in terms of what they expect their graduates to be able to do. Some find that creating the initiative, securing the funding, building the buildings, recruiting students and promoting the school to be less difficult then delivering on the promise to provide real tools and skills that are in sync with the scale of complexity facing their graduates. How does Zollverein plan to deliver on its promise to students in terms of design innovation tools and skills? Ralph Bruder: I fully agree with you that it is really a challenge to provide our students with the adequate tools and skills to find right answers to complex problems or, even better, to formulate the right questions. That is one of the key issues in creating a new curriculum. (By the way, it should also be an essential aspect of an already fixed curriculum). But before answering your question how we at the Zollverein School deal with that challenge, let me briefly comment on your statement about getting things started, about securing the funding, about building the buildings and, last but not least, about finding the first students. From my point of view, there is a difference between the introduction of a new program into an already existing school and the foundation of a completely new school. When opening a new program at an existing school, you can benefit from the reputation of the school (which makes funding easier), you can use existing buildings and you sometimes have access to administration offices (e.g., for student recruitment). But it might be difficult to point out the differences between the new program compared to the existing ones. Introducing a new program and simultaneously establishing a new school can give you more degrees of freedom for the development of new content. But, as with any product development, in creating a new school you have to transform your concept into a formal appearance in order to share your idea with others. The building might be such a formal appearance for representing the concept of a school (e.g., the Bauhaus buildings or the design school in Ulm). So I think that the meaning of architecture for establishing a new school should not be underestimated. But it is even more important to find the most suitable first students for such a new program. These first students will form and influence the concept of the school. Students with several years of professional experience are an integral part of the program development, especially for a graduate program like the one at the Zollverein School. This is a first answer to your question. We bring together students with disciplinary backgrounds in the economies and in different creative disciplines and also with different professional experiences. Just by sharing their respective previous problem solving strategies, they come up with new approaches for solving complex problems.
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Furthermore, we offer the interpenetration of management and design in different types of courses. Within the lecture-type courses we have joint courses of teachers with different backgrounds. So, for example, the professors for strategic marketing and culture/society are doing some lectures together about the relationship between actual cultural studies and strategy formulation. In seminar-type courses (like Bettina von Stamm’s “Innovation” module), the students have to apply theoretical findings to real case studies. A sample case study would be to look at the innovation level of the companies they are working for (or running themselves) and come up with some ideas as to how to improve this innovation level. Projects are another integrative part of the MBA program. They run over three months and are related to practical problems. The aim of the project is the implementation and validation of skills, concepts and methods the students have learned in different courses. The learning and working happens within interdisciplinary teams. The projects are guided by different MBA tutors and, again, with their various disciplinary backgrounds they deliver different perspectives to the project. To be honest, to handle those different perspectives was and still is not very easy for the students, but we believe that the sometimes controversial discussions are the breeding ground for innovative and creative thinking. Finally, when looking for a topic for their master thesis, we encourage our students to make use of the new skills and tools they learned at the Zollverein School. Therefore, we have several sessions with each student to discuss the topic of their master thesis and what their topics has to do with “business design.” We also discuss what methodological approaches they want to use within their master thesis, and how they intend to apply design innovation tools and skills.
10 GK VanPatter: I see this connection to design described on your website: “The design process is the conceptual foundation on which the Zollverein School of Management and Design is built.” I’m guessing that you are not teaching “design” skills in the traditional sense of the term? Can you give us a sense of what you teach in the “design” components of your program? Ralph Bruder: Correct, we are not teaching “practical” design skills to our students in the context of product design or graphic design, for example.The intention of the “Design Studies” module is to give an overview of different fields of application for design and the design processes that are typical for those fields of application. The teachers within this module are experts in design, architecture, etc., and are able to reflect on their practical aspects. By using case studies, we explore the process underlying certain successful design projects.But we also have experts on design theory teaching in the “Design Studies” module. In their courses different approaches for design methodology are presented, and the applicability of such methodological approaches in different contexts is discussed. Finally, we integrate the teachers from the design studies in our other program modules, especially from the “Perspectives from Design” module. Page 8 of 16
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11 GK VanPatter: Near and dear to us here at NextDesign Leadership Institute, is mastery of adaptive transformation processes, so let me ask you about this aspect of your program. We often find graduate program leaders unaware that working in cross-disciplinary teams requires new behaviors, skills and tools. In many graduate programs students are still being assigned to teams, given a team assignment and then told that this is going to teach them not only process mastery, but also how to work in cross-disciplinary teams. It’s hard to believe that is still going on out there. The problem with that model is that it is no longer competitive in the marketplace I am curious to know how adaptable innovation process mastery and cross-disciplinary team dynamics mastery are being taught in the Zollverein School program? Ralph Bruder: We learned from experience that it is indeed challenging to ask professionals with cross-disciplinary backgrounds to work together in teams, especially in a school setting. All of them are used to working in cross-disciplinary teams in their everyday work life, but in most cases of professional team work, they are also used to clear role assignments (e.g., one side is the client, the other is the contractor.) And, of course, they are used to being part of a hierarchical system that can affect the efficiency of teamwork substantially. In many companies there is a dominance of people with a business (often financial) background. It is still quite rare to find professional teams with mutual consideration for business and design perspectives. So even (or especially) for students with professional experiences, it is difficult to use team work as a source for innovative problem solving strategies. And I fully agree with you that it is naïve to think that it is sufficient to assign students with different backgrounds to teams and assume they will learn cross-disciplinary team dynamics mastery simply by doing team work. So we decided to integrate cross-disciplinary team work in different modules of our MBA program (e.g., in the “Organization & Leadership” module and in the “Innovation” module taught by Bettina von Stamm). But we are not only looking at the dynamics of cross-disciplinary team work from an outside perspective. We accompany the students’ projects (which are executed in crossdisciplinary teams) with a module called “Leadership Skills.” The aim of this module is to support personal development and leadership skills of our students by introducing selfreflective elements into their team building and team work. Some of the topics within this module are: • • • • •
Self-organization Management of complexity and difference Structures of power within organizations Leadership and organization Participation
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Let me give you an example of the way the teacher of this module works with the students. At the beginning of their MBA program they have a team building session where each of them first has to describe their actual personal skills, strengths and resources. Based on this description, teams can be built in which the skills and strengths of each team member is of benefit to all the other team members. One result of such team building is more respectful cooperation with each other. Another result is that ideas from all team members are taken seriously when discussing possible solutions for a given problem.
12 GK VanPatter: Significantly advancing how cross-disciplinary innovation dynamics are taught is key to moving from the Design 2.0 model where the focus was on understanding user behaviors to the Design 3.0 model where the focus is rethought to include a more robust understanding of ourselves as the innovation team. If you are interested, perhaps we might conduct a small integrative thinking research experiment together. Let’s call it Defuzzing WHO / Understanding Our Innovative Selves. We can provide the tools if you can provide a class of willing students. If you have a class that has already written down what they think their strengths and weaknesses are, that will be great. We do not need to know any names for this research. We can assign each participant a number. Let me know if you might be interested Ralph Bruder: I will have a session with our students this weekend so this might be a good opportunity to start our small research experiment.
13 GK VanPatter: I understand that you did the experiment with your class over the weekend. How did that go? Ralph Bruder: I conducted the Defuzzing WHO experiment with my “Business Design� class that consists of sixteen students. Their backgrounds include industrial design, economics, mechanical engineering, management, architecture, communications, real estate, new media, project development, urban design and business. We did the twostep exercise you suggested. First I used a white board to make a freehand drawing of a typical project process. I drew three large circles in a horizontal row. Inside the circles I wrote the words: 1. Find/Formulate Challenge/Opportunity 2. Formulate Solution 3. Implement Solution Then I asked the sixteen students and two teachers (I taught the workshop with Joachim M. Maier, a colleague from Zurich) to take a blank piece of paper and make the same drawing. They should indicate with a red pen in which parts of the development process they think their strengths lay.
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Here are the results of this little exercise: Nine think their strengths are in formulating problems/opportunities, six think their strengths are in formulating solutions and three think their strengths are in implementing solutions. Then we continued with part two of our research experiment. We used the Interactive Innovation Profile Tool that you made available for us via the Internet. This tool asks you eighteen times to describe the way you solve problems. With each question you have four possible answers to put in the appropriate order according to your own problem solving style. (E.g., How to you solve problems? Alert – ready – poised – eager). After answering those eighteen questions, your own unique Innovation Profile is presented. The Basadur Innovation Profile Tool distinguishes four possible Innovation Types: Generator, Conceptualizer, Optimizer and Implementer. You get a ranking as to which one of those basic types best fits your own Innovation Profile and which one fits least. Because of some technical problems, we were only able to get nine Innovation Profiles. Among the nine profiles, we have one Generator, five Conceptualizers, one Optimizer and two Implementers. The results of the Innovation Profile were very much in line with the ratings of the self-estimated strengths according to part one of our little experiment. So the Generator and most of the Conceptualizers rated their strengths to be formulating problems/opportunities. The Optimizer and one of the Conceptualizers rated their strengths to be formulating solutions. And finally the two Implementers rated their strengths to be finding solutions. We also discussed the results of this little experiment about understanding ourselves in the context of cross-disciplinary innovation with the second class of our MBA students who started their study just this weekend. And again, most of them feel that they have strengths in formulating problems/opportunities and solutions. So I wonder what you think about the results of our small experiment.
14 GK VanPatter: Super. Let’s discuss off-line the “technical challenges” that the students encountered as we are making the final adjustments to the beta test version of the Interactive Innovation Profile before we launch it here on the NextD site. It looks like this is the make up of your class/team: GENERATORS:
1
CONCEPTUALIZERS:
5
OPTIMIZERS:
1
IMPLEMENTERS:
2
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Below is a map of your class/team including the instructor:
There are many ways to think about your team profile. This is WHO your team is in terms of preferences.You can see how the results transcend disciplines. So organizing ourselves just by discipline tags alone is relatively meaningless if the objective is to drive towards innovative results. For example: a Conceptualizer and an Optimizer might be from the same discipline but have very different preferences. If this group was in an organizational setting and you were being asked to address any kind of product, process or organizational challenge/opportunity, you would likely want to have a balanced, whole brain team, meaning that you would want some balance across the model. If we look at the nine profiles in this class there is a disproportionately large number of Conceptualizers and a small number of Generators and Optimizers. With that in mind, you might turn the question back to the students and ask them to try on these five questions: •
If this was the leadership team of a new startup company, what kinds of challenges do you think they might encounter?
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If this was a product design project team within a large organization, what kinds of challenges do you think they might encounter? Page 12 of 16
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•
If this was a business design team within a large organization, what kinds of challenges do you think they might encounter?
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If this was your team and no changes in participation were possible, what would you ask this team to do to compensate for the team’s profile?
•
If you were the CEO and had to lead this team in an organizational setting, what kinds of challenges would you likely encounter?
The Innovation Profile is one component in a larger Innovation Team Dynamics Analysis Framework that itself is part of a broader Continuous Innovation Enabling Toolkit that we use in our Humantific practice. This is what we call “inbound innovation knowledge” that has historically been missing from both traditional design and business education settings. In practice, the Innovation Profile experience becomes the backdrop for a whole series of process-related learnings that connect strategic objectives, team diversity, integrative thinking, team design, business design, cultural values, knowledge use preferences, and organizational understanding of continuous innovation. In practice we work in the trenches with leaders struggling to make-sense of mountains of challenge, project and team complexities. For many years we have believed that much of the future of next design and innovation lies in scaling up sense-making abilities. To say this another way; lack of sense-making can really slow down innovation. Although much of this is proprietary to our practice we do share some of these tools through various NextD initiatives including our design community workshops, and through our design community research projects such as Defuzzing WHO. Thanks to you, Ralph, and the Zollverein School for collaborating in our beta-beta test. In the context of NextD research, we are now moving ahead with a wider Defuzzing WHO experiment. At this time we are inviting twelve graduate innovation schools in twelve countries to participate in the final beta round. Included will be graduate schools in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, India, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States. We have added a visual thinking step on the front end so if you want to run the experiment again, let’s sync up and I can send you the updated instructions. :-) What were the profiles of the two instructors? Ralph Bruder: Thank you for your helpful comment. I will discuss with our students your questions concerning team diversity, integrative thinking, team design, business design and organizational understanding as these are some of the key topics of our program. I guess you would hardly find those topics in traditional design schools. We think that is one of the major differences with the upcoming innovation schools. So we really would be interested to run the experiment again, especially as part of an international group of graduate innovation schools. I am curious to see if there are any differences between the schools with respect to the students they are attracting.
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To answer your question concerning the profile of the instructors, I have to confess that unfortunately we only have the Innovation Profile of one instructor. (Guess who?) The Innovation Profile of this instructor is Conceptualizer/Generator. He rated himself to have strengths in formulating problems/opportunities.
15 GK VanPatter: Its always fun for us to see what the instructor’s preferences are! When we get together in June we might include implications of teacher profiles in our conversation if you wish. For innovation instructors there is a lot to consider. Going forward from here, yes of course we will be glad to include Zollverein in the next round of the global Defuzzing WHO research. I am sure there will be other possibilities for NextD/Zollverein collaboration as well..:-) Hey, we like your spirit! As we round the corner towards home on this one, let me connect back to the notion of differencing for a moment since you mentioned this several times in this conversation. As more innovation-focused graduate programs emerge, differences also come into view internationally. Being the first of the business design hybrid schools, Zollverein will likely enjoy a few short-term advantages as you jump ahead by more deliberately combining business, management and design. Several American graduate design schools are also moving in that direction rapidly, assembling hybrid program combinations rather then entire new hybrid schools. In the next few years there will likely be numerous design/business combinations emerging. No big surprise there. While that hybrid dimension of difference will likely fade rather quickly as others join in, we are already seeing more deeply rooted and probably more important differences emerge as well. In the United States the two well-known graduate design schools that dominate have common threads. Both are working hard to construct new forms of design innovation and both have deep foundational roots in product design. For better and or for worse this is the origin of their toolset and remains their primary focus. Among other things they are grappling with toolbox adaptability and transportability challenges as organizational innovation advisors today have to be prepared to unpack, make sense of and help tackle a wide range of complex challenges outside of product design. In contrast we see the emerging European innovation schools starting from different foundations and are, from the outset, seeking to engage in a wide range of innovation challenges beyond the scale of product, service and consumer experience creation. The emerging Europe based innovation schools seem to be much more interested in the social fabric of innovation in organizations, how sustainable innovation capabilities are constructed in organizations and how organizations skill-up for continuous change. The Europe based innovation schools also seem to be more attuned to and interested in the large complex social and environmental issues facing the planet. These differences in roots and scale focus have enormous impact as they cascade into many interconnected issues including the degrees of reinvention occurring within and perspectives on the future. Of course lets not forget our friends in India, China and Australia. We have many readers there. While the emerging design/innovation schools in China remain very Page 14 of 16
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product focused, schools in India and Australia seem to be more aligned with the European schools in their concern about social and environmental issues as well as their interest in applying design thinking to such challenges. There is something else here Ralph, probably even more important then roots, scale and focus. I was struck by your description of a “mutual respect model.” This vision has the potential to be a huge, paradigm shifting idea and a great differentiator for Zollverein if you can realize this goal. In other schools with hybrid program ambitions we often see design being positioned as the second fiddle, as simply the enabler of business as usual interests. In other words business as usual leads and design enables. Of course it is unlikely that business as usual on the planet will fundamentally change unless a “mutual respect model” exists. It’s a great optimistic innovation vision Ralph and one that will hopefully inspire others. Globally a very interesting design/business/innovation visionscape is emerging among the graduate schools. As the hybrids come on stream they will add new and probably unexpected wrinkles. Of course operationalizing some of these new visions, moving from the sizzle to the steak, is going to be a significant challenge for many graduate institutions. As always, tools. frameworks, processes and innovation related knowledge are emerging as keys to operationalizing such strategic visions. Here again, noticeable differences are already emerging with very different marketplace behaviors in motion. We see the new innovation programs/schools in Europe, India and even China open to all kinds of expertise as they rapidly work to find, adapt and or create real tools applicable to their particular visions. In contrast the high profile American graduate schools tend to be more closed around cliques of expertise that support their product design vision of the future. It is rapidly becoming clear that openness and adaptability are already important ingredients in the new landscape of hybrid innovation graduate programs. With all of these dynamics in mind, it is going to be very interesting to see how the various innovation program initiatives work themselves out in the long term. It is probably no surprise to you that at NextD we get a lot of email inquiries from folks around the world seeking advice regarding which graduate school to attend. The good news is that for new generations of graduate students the choices keep getting better. For our readers contemplating attendance in one of the innovation schools, here are twelve things to consider: Graduate Hybrid Schools Consideration Framework: 1. Vision? 2. Roots? 3. Disciplines Combined? 4. Focus Scale? (Design 1.0?, 2.0?, 3.0?) 5. Tool Types? 6. Openness/Adaptability? 7. Location/Language? 8. Leadership/Faculty? 9. Facilities? 10. Cost? 11. Duration? 12. Public Profile? Page 15 of 16
NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Conversation 25
Business Design Academy
Thanks again for taking the time to have this conversation with us, Ralph. I will now turn the floor over to you for final comments. In doing so, I will ask you to tell us where you think Zollverein graduates are destined to operate in the world. Five years from now, where will your graduates be and what kinds of innovation work will they be doing? Ralph Bruder: Interesting and helpful to read about your perception of differences between innovation schools. I fully agree with you that in Europe many of the new innovation schools (and also some of the existing design schools) are trying to bring design (and, of course, designers) to new fields of application, especially with respect to urgent social and environmental problems. In Germany, this is very much in historic line with design at Bauhaus and the design school in Ulm. But I also agree that it is not enough just to claim that design can help solve those fundamental problems. It must be willing to produce evidence as well. And that is an essential challenge for the students of Zollverein School in the future. In addition to their contributions to economic and social developments, they can also show the potential of design for inspiring innovation processes. I hope that some of our graduates will find leadership positions in large-scale enterprises, but also in small and medium-sized companies. It would be good to read in business magazines that they were able to develop futureoriented, sustainable strategies for the companies they are working for, and that the number of such employees in these companies could be increased. I also would like to see some of our graduates in responsible positions in politics or a similar context. Nowadays you find many legal experts in politics and public administration that are used mainly to justify solutions. It is not only the justification of existing solutions that we are looking for, but also the introduction of new and applicable solutions into the fabric of society as well. I believe that the graduates of Zollverein School are well prepared to become a driving force for influencing future social developments. Finally, I think that some of them will be engaged in teaching in one way or another. This might be true especially for graduates from the methodological-oriented programs. With these final comments I would like to say thank you again for this conversation. It would be a pleasure meeting you at Zollverein this June and to have you as guest teacher for our students. Please allow me to take the opportunity to invite the readers of NextD Journal also to visit Zollverein School. In the meantime, join our dialogue about the Zollverein School at www.zollverein-school.de/blog.
NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN
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