I was invited to an interesting event hosted by a number of Design school student. They call this a B-School meets D-school mixer event. It was a last minute invite for me and since I am in London I decided to check that out. The even was organized by Natasha Giezen and friends at the upstairs of the Windsor Castle pub in London Business School. Natasha has an interesting background, she has four degrees (not sure if it is three and she’s working on her fourth) including an MBA from LBS and MA in History and is now working towards her MA at St. Martin’s. She told me a funny story how she was hired as an Accenture Consultant and has no idea of what the job is like. She's a typical corporate misfit..but very creative.
Here’s the original invite for the event:
"Fashion Design - Interactive Teaching - Film, that's some of the fields the designers attending "Designers meet Suits" are into. It's a great opportunity of meeting the people who come up with the creative ideas we are used to dissect. ….Because when d- and b-school students collaborate new breakthrough ideas pop up!”
I think it was a very cool idea. The D-school students were from the MA program at St. Martin College of Design (over the years they produce top talents includes John Galliano, fashion designer and Gilbert and George, 1986 Turner Prize winners) and the B-school people are LBS’ MBAs. They were moving from table to tables to talk about their ideas. It is sort of like speed-dating.
There’s a lot of saying that D-School is the new B-school. Not quite the case in my opinion, I think it is not one of the other, it is both. People like Natasha who operates in the intersection of business and design are the creative (business) class that drives innovation and change in business.
There’s the new German D-school - the Zollverein School of Management and Design. The school is positioning itself squarely in the MBA tradition, even participating in the World MBA Tour, a join international recruiting tour of top MBA schools. There are also special doctoral programs in design science offered with other universities. There’s still questions of companies in Europe will be open to or enthusiastic about or see the need for such an innovative degree. It will be worth tracking how the graduates end up in a few years. That will give us a good leading indicator of what countries, and companies, truly do get it. 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.
