Rotman Magazine on the Creative Age

“When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from the world of design”, writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management in the Spring/Summer issue of the school’s magazine. “Business people don’t need to understand designers better; they need to be designers – to think and work like designers and to embed design-shop characteristics in their organizations.”

In ‘Designing in Hostile Territory’, Martin discusses what design thinkers can do when they come up against reliability-obsessed, non-design thinkers.

Creativity involves distinct kinds of thinking that must be cultivated both in the individual and in surrounding societies, according to best-selling author and researcher Richard Florida. He talks about why creative capital is drawn to certain places, and the dangers of our increasingly “spikey” world.

Having spent the past decade studying how designers work and create, Darden School of Business Professor Jeanne Liedtka offers ten suggestions to improve our design thinking in “If Managers Thought Like Designers”.

Harvard’s Teresa Amabile – the only top-tier business school professor who has devoted her research entirely to the study of creativity – shows how positive emotional experiences relate to creative thinking on the job.

Creativity often springs from diverse groups of people talking about possibilities – people who look different, think differently, and have different skills and backgrounds. But what combinations of human capital work best? Rotman Assistant Professor Kristina Dahlin attempts to answer this in Maximizing Productivity in Diverse Teams.

Elsewhere in the magazine, Heather Fraser, director of Business Design Initiatives at the Rotman School, talks about ‘design thinking’ vs. ‘design doing’; Tuck School of Business professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble explain the importance of forgetting, borrowing and learning for strategic experiments; the magazine features SAS’s Jim Goodnight; Rotman Professors John Hull and Alan White describe new tools for credit risk; and University of Chicago economist David Galenson discusses the difference between ‘experimental’ and ‘conceptual’ innovators.

Download magazine (pdf, 5.6 mb, 116 pages)

(via Noise between Stations)