business

How can we use design to challenge the prevailing wisdom of business education? As Dean of the Rotman School of Management at The University of Toronto, Roger Martin has led a controversial & exciting campaign to do just that. He has famously asserted that “Business people don’t need to understand designers better: they need to be designers.” This is a foundational idea in an emerging area in the theory and practice of business called Design Thinking. In his talk Roger will speak about his recent book, The Design of Business, and why he believes so strongly that design is essential to competitive advantage.

About the Speaker: 
Roger Martin has served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management since 1998. He is advisor to the CEOs of several major corporations, has published several books on business strategy, and writes for BusinessWeek.com’s Innovation and Design Channel, Washington Post’s On Leadership blog and Financial Times’ Judgment Call column. Roger Martin has been named one of the world’s top 50 management thinkers by The Times of London and one of the world’s 10 most influential business professors by Business Week. He received his AB from Harvard College in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.

Where is culture? Culture is everywhere we look, and (perhaps more importantly) everywhere we don’t look. It informs our work, our purchases, our usage, our expectations, our comfort, and our communications (indeed, if you aren’t familiar with a specific geographic and historical set of experiences, the presumably clever title for this talk will instead be perhaps bland). In this presentation, Steve will explore the ways we can experience, observe, and understand diverse cultures to foster successful collaborations, usable products, and desirable experiences. 

In this workshop, Steve will show you how producers of "stuff" (products, services, and beyond) can work with user research data to identify new businesses opportunities. One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of user research in business is that projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. As designers (in the broadest sense of the word) increasingly become involved in using contextual research to inform their design work, they may find themselves holding onto a trove of raw data but with little awareness of how to turn it into design. The emphasis in this workshop (including an exercise in the days and weeks beforehand) will be on strengthening the creative link between "data" and "action." By the end, participants will have developed a range of high-level concepts that respond to a business problem and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of that problem. 

About the Speaker
Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a bite-sized Bay Area firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. In the past 15 years, Steve has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. Steve writes regularly on topics from interaction design to pop culture for interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, Johnny Holland, and the Portigal Consulting blog All This ChittahChattah. Heis an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.

Is design ready to take its rightful place as an important component of innovation and cultural change? It’s no longer possible to develop successful solutions to cultural or climate problems without integrating people, ideas, and techniques from the Design, Business, and Sustainability domains. But first, we have some reckoning to do with our past...

About the Speaker:
Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts. He is one of the pioneers in Experience Design, speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues. He consults strategically for companies to build more meaningful experiences for their customers. His latest book, Making Meaning, explores how companies can create products and services to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers. He has 3 new books debuting in 2009: Design is the Problem, about sustainable design; Experience Design 1.1, and Experience Design 1 Cards, a design tool that helps designers create more meaningful experiences.

When we think about creative industries, is data the first thing that comes to mind? Creative outputs have long been considered as intangibles – hard to quantify and hard to measure – but that’s all about to change.

Thanks to the rise of data abundance, smart companies like Target, Amazon and Netflix have tapped into this new quantitative intelligence to better understand their consumers. Now, we are entering the next phase of this disruptive transformation: Companies are turning those sophisticated algorithms inward, using analytics to attract and retain the best and brightest minds. From Google to Starbucks and Gengo to Prezi, companies large and small are already using data to reverse flagging sales, improve performance, and prevent the repetition of mistakes. An analytical revolution is transforming creative industries. Are you ready?

What can design teach the world of business? And what might business bring to design? With the business world finally focusing on innovation, design has become a new (if ill-understood) priority for managers and leaders. But the real innovation isn't the need for more products and services but to innovate what business, itself, means and how it functions. Nathan Shedroff is a pioneer in interaction and experience design and serial entrepreneur who now focused on how design and sustainability can inform and transform business as we know it.

About the Presenter:

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of California College of Arts’ groundbreaking MBA in Design Strategy. He is one of the pioneers of experience design, an approach to design that encompasses multiple senses and explores the common characteristics in all media that make experiences successful; he also works in the related fields of interaction design and information design. Nathan speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including the update to his 2001 book, Experience Design 1.1. He’s a serial entrepreneur; works in several media; and consults strategically to help companies build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers. He lives in San Francisco, where the climate, culture, and industry make it easy to have an esoteric and amorphous title like experience strategist and actually make a living. For more information, please visit his personal website at www.nathan.com

Presented by sLab's Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG). At Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), one group has chosen to explore sustainability from the perspective of business models. SSBMG focuses primarily on the middle and bottom of the pyramid of organizations including start-up, SMB and SME categories. The group includes industry practitioners, faculty and graduate students from OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight & Innovation program, as well as from York University.