Design thinking and design skills play a critical role in Weatherhead's newly-designed MBA program. The first of two-years is comprised of year-long courses in accounting, finance, marketing & supply chain, strategy, statistics & decision modelling, and leadership & human organization. There are eight dialogues in which teams of senior managers explore how they have addressed wicked problems in their organizations. In the second year, students can choose from a variety of year-long field-based courses. Design skills are developed and applied in several, including the course Identifying and Acting on Design Opportunities.

Every day, managers have opportunities to improve their organizations by creating and remaking processes, structures, products, and services. To excel at this, they need to expand on their roles as analysts and decision-makers to become competent as designers. When managers study designing, they learn to reframe problems, to sketch and prototype their ideas, to apply the logic of possibilities to see through default situations, and to iterate in productive ways. This two-semester course builds on the realization that managers are deeply engaged in designing as part of their everyday work and that they should get good at it.

During the first semester the course focuses on identifying design opportunities in organizations. A major outcome of the semester's inquiry is a presentation of the challenges and opportunities discovered during the design analysis of a client organization. The presentation includes a conceptualization of the client's current situation and opportunities, along with a statement of their design requirements. It is successful to the extent that it demonstrates learning by creating unexpected value to the client.

During the second semester, students work in teams on design problems identified during the first semester. This stage of the inquiry moves from the idealized to the pragmatic and each team is expected to create at least one design artifact for the client's interaction environment. The outcome of the second semester is a detailed design and plan of implementation for selected aspects of the overall conceptual design of the client's environment. The criteria for judging the outcome include: 1) the creative, insightful re-conceptualization of the firm and its environment, 2) the economic, technical and human feasibility of the proposed designs, and 3) the magnitude and sustainability of their potential value creation for the firm and society.

Other design-related opportunities in the MBA include courses in business planning, designing intellectual property strategies, and designing sustainable systems for world betterment.

Our Executive Doctor of Management (EDM) program also has a design focus and many of the students doing a PhD in Information Systems pursue design-related reserach. We also offer day-long and custom programs through Weatherhead Executive Education.

Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Fred Collopy [eds.], Managing as Designing, Stanford University Press, 2004, This book is the result of bringing great management scholars nd designers together to consider what we might teach each other. Keynote chapters from Frank Gehry and Karl Weick anchor exceptionally creative contributions from artists, language and music theorists, software and product designers, sociologists, economists, and organizational theorists, managers and others. The book provides a foundation for thinking about managers as designers. It summarizes some things that managers can learn from design practice. And it envisions a future in which managers grow ever more comfortable in their role as designers.

Several chapters can be downloaded.

• Richard J. Boland, Jr. & Fred Collopy, Why Design Matters for Managers
• John King, People Muth Be Amuthed
• Karl Weick, Designing for Thrownness

Richard Buchanan & Victor Margolin, Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies This book was the output of a conference that was held at the University of Illinois in 1990. Twenty-five designers, design educators, and other scholars met to discuss the design process. Eleven papers are organized into three sections: shaping the subject, the world of action, and values and responsibilities.

Victor Margolin & Richard Buchanan, The Idea of Design: Explorations in Design Studies This stimulating collection of essays, originally published in Design Issues, represents a shift in the focus of design thinking from its focus on the objects of design to its increasing focus on "the psychological, social, and cultural contexts that give meaning and value to products and to the discipline of design practice." Essays are organized in three sections: reflecting on design, the meaning of products, and design and culture.

Richard J.Boland, Jr., Kalle Lyytinen and Youngjin Yoo, "Wakes of Innovation in Project Networks: The Case of Digital 3-D Representations in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction," Organization Science, Vol 18, No 4, July-August 2007, 632-647. The paper reports on the first of our three year studies of design and innovation in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. The study focused on Frank Gehry's use of 3-D technologies in his architectural design of the PBL Building, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and several other projects. It showed the wakes of innovation that were stimulated throughout the construction and engineering professions, especially as driven by the design images of Frank O. Gehry.

This paper received the Academy of Management award for Best Published Paper 2008 from the Organizational and Communication and Information Systems (OCIS) Division. The 2007 issues of 11 top journals were surveyed for nominations. The paper was recognized by the judges as one which would "change the ways that we think about design and innovation from now forward".

We regularly gather together managers, management scholars and designers to carry on a dialogue about this important emerging area. Here are some of the workshops we have been involved with.

Positive Design Workshop, 2008, Monterrey, Mexico, This workshop addressed the contribution and role of design, business and information technology in driving positive change for the broadest segments of humanity.

Creativity and Rational in Software Design, 2008, State College, PA. Jack Carroll at Penn State brought together a score of researchers with backgrounds and interests in design rationale, creativity and design to consider their intersections. Creativity and rationale connote the complementary natures of design: creating new worlds through lightning bolts of innovation versus analyzing the underlying tradeoffs in current artifacts and systems to guide the incremental development of new ones. The workshop premise is that these poles should not be merely opposed world-views, and that coordinating them and integrating them is a key to ever having a serious Science of Design.

Designing Digital Communities, 2007, Philadelphia, PA. A workshop held that explored how digital technologies can be designed to enhance urban experience.

Design Requirements, 2007, Cleveland, OH. The Design Requirements Project is concerned with developing principles, theoretical foundations, and practical guidance for identifying, soliciting, deriving, and managing design requirements for complex software-intensive systems.

Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens, 2005, Cleveland, OH. The central theme of the Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens conference was the potential contribution and role of a positive lens in the design of information and organizations. The conference brought together a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars from industry and academia who are interested in exploring "positive" approaches, such as Appreciative Inquiry, for designing organizations, information, technologies, or social action, which promote positive change and fosters betterment in human organizations and communities.

Managing as Designing, 2002, Cleveland, OH. With the opening of the Frank Gehry designed Peter B. Lewis building, we gathered management scholars together with graphic, product, software and other designers to consider what design could teach management. The workshop resulted in a book and a half hour documentary film by the same name.