D-Schools Are Innovating Faster Than B-Schools

Stanford D-School is innovating and now offers a few exciting class options. I must say I am very  impressed with them. Interesting enough, all four courses are so relevant to our current innovation projects. I just wonder why B-School are not doing the same. I guess B-School are often behind the curve in this fast moving world. I really like the course "Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability", I think B-Schools should design new courses similar to this such as "Business Design for Triple Bottom Line" or "Business Model Design for Sustainability" or "Driving Innovation in Large Organizations". I'd love to teach all these. Oh you know what, how about "Visualizing Your Future Business Strategy"? Unfortunately B-Schools are still using old case studies that were written for the industrial age and disruptive technologies were uncommon or unheard of. If they don't do something, B-Schools themselves can slowly becoming irrelevant.

Here are my favorite courses:

Design for Agile Aging - Maintaining mobility is critical to successful aging. Impaired mobility limits daily activities and independence. For individuals who are already mobility-impaired, or are at risk of becoming so, small improvements in mobility can dramatically improve quality of life. This two-quarter interdisciplinary course sequence is designed to explore innovative ways to integrate computer and device technologies with behavioral and social interventions to maintain and enhance mobility in seniors. 
Transformative Design
- Designed products have always had tremendous impact on individual, social and cultural behavior. This project-based course investigates how interactive technologies can be designed to expressly encourage behavioral transformation. Class sessions will be structured around interdisciplinary discussion of topics such as self-efficacy, social support, and mechanism of cultural change in domain such as weight-loss, energy conservation or safe driving; accompanying lab sessions will familiarize students with basic hardware and software tools for interaction prototyping.

Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability - Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability is a two-quarter project course in which graduate students design comprehensive solutions to challenges faced by the world’s poor. Students learn design thinking and its specific application to problems in the developing world.  Students work in multidisciplinary teams at the intersection of business, technology, and human values.  All projects are done in close partnership with a variety of international organizations.  These organizations host student fieldwork, facilitate the design development, and implement ideas after the class ends.

Teams will develop empathy with all stakeholders so that they can develop a solution that fits into the culture, aspirations, and constraints of their target users.  Teams will iterate on their designs and business models through a rapid sequence of prototyping and testing.  Students also will interact with entrepreneurs who have launched ventures in the developing world, including several alumni from the class.  The final deliverable is a product or service framed in a comprehensive implementation plan including the business model, the technical innovations, the cultural rationale, and the appropriate next steps. 

Innovation in Complex Organizations 
- The purpose of this course is to offer students a chance to pause, discuss, and integrate design thinking and innovation in business in a small seminar, case-study format.  This centerpiece of this small seminar will be three or four “live” case studies where, executives from large, complex organizations come to class and describe their efforts to move creative new ideas from inception to implementation. They will describe how their organizations screen and move along promising ideas and how their organizational practices facilitate and impede that journey.  Student teams will analyze each case and provide recommendations to the executives, who along with the teaching team, will judge the work.  The final project will be a general analysis and set of recommendations about this vexing organizational problem.

Business Practice Innovation -
Treating Business Practices as Prototypes. In this small, team-based, multidisciplinary class, students will work in dyads or larger teams.  They will apply the design process to specific practices (like talent management, organizational design, and communication with external stakeholders) in organizations that may include a software firm, a professional services firm, and an airline, and treating the targeted practices as prototypes.