Davos, Economics and Left & Right Brain Thinking
As you might have recognized Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek’s innovation & design blogger is currently reporting directly from the World Economic Forum in Davos:
“Attendees at this year’s meeting, which begins on Jan. 24, will see many familiar faces. But they’ll also notice an influx of people no one would have thought qualified to join a few years ago: designers. Davos 2006, in fact, is shaping up to be a very different kind of forum. In addition to the standard topics, an unprecedented 22 sessions will focus on the general theme of “Innovation, Creativity & Design Strategy.”
This is good news for the design community and this is clearly strengthing the design’s stakes at the corporate table. Finally this is also good news for “design management” or let it be “business design” MBA students as well since:
“Yet, the global management paradigm is clearly shifting from left to right brain thinking. The new management mantra of the 21st century is breakthrough innovation via creative-design thinking. It’s replacing the old business-value proposition of incremental improvement through control that’s still being taught in most B-schools and peddled by most consulting companies …”
So stay tuned (also via this blog) on how the first MBA Class of 2006 at Zollverein School will make their way from the paradigm of “control” to what I among others have characterized as “Abductive Reasoning”: Collect, Collate, Consolidate, Collaborate.