Design Driven Management Education

Abstract

Design Driven Management Education is the title of a project which aims at analysing how design, and in particular Design Thinking mind-set, had introduced new paradigms of learning in a class of management students. Students were just enrolled at the first year of a Master program in Innovation and Marketing at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice.

The dissertation starts with a focus on the need of business schools’ creative destruction (Eyring and Christensen 2011) to develop more valuable and emphatic leaders able to be competitive and impactful in current complex ecosystem. To gain these abilities leaders have to become reality’s smart interpreters. The experiential learning would serve the purpose, but business schools are lacking in this area of competence.

To meaningful redesign management education, the Design and Innovation Management (D&IM) module stands as an attempt to give marketing management students the possibility to become familiar with the design attitude and tools to understand consumers’ needs and to foster innovation. The investigation commits to a qualitative inductive research the role to outline the entire process. Precisely, the thesis explores the story of learners’ reactions to each Design Thinking space mixing theoretical references to workshop activities, diverse qualitative data to ethnographic research. The narrative is intertwined with many vignettes to depict the story as realistic as possible.