Creating business models at a design school
Posted by Ricardo Dutra Goncalves on November 19, 2014At Parsons, we have co-created an environment that encourages people to think broadly, collaborate and speculate about solutions and possibilities for the future. Early on in the program, I learned that design was about the quality of our ideas and how we could start bringing them into reality based on exploring what users think and feel while interacting with them. On the other side, business has always being about management. It is about finding the most efficient structure and process that will deliver the best results and maximize the organization’s profit. It is about growth and the capacity of an idea to sustain itself in the “real world”.
There seems to be space for a lot of positive collaboration between business managers and designers. However, there is also space for a lot of conflict. Designers tend to think of new possibilities that could exist. They enjoy spending time in spaces that are unclear and speculative – while business managers would find these spaces not only unbearable at some points, but possibly a waste of time. In the meanwhile, business managers are able slice the product in different markets, develop financial models, and raise capital. However, most will have trouble in envisioning how the whole thing could be different if we started developing products from completely new assumptions. I would risk to say that by lacking that skill, business managers become very good at growing things as they are but not as they could be.
Recently, the business world has incorporated the buzzword “design thinking”, which they correlate with a room full of post-its and “creative” people. They might stop by and join a “design thinking” conversation, but under quite doubtful circumstances in most of the times. They doubt the process, they doubt the creativity “talk” and they mainly doubt the “openness” given to the discussion. At the same time, designers struggle with frameworks and mainly with bringing their ideas into the “real world” – sustaining a solution, product or organization is quite a challenging task that requires focus and structure.
I believe that design has a high contribution in promoting a sort of “visionary leadership”, one that can question how things are and explore new possibilities. While business can be very good in addressing the social and economic systems as they are, by creating products that people love and buy. In the context of a graduate school, fine tuning the right possibilities for collaboration is a hard task, but I wonder whether we could spend more time doing projects that are transdisciplinary in nature. By for example, going beyond the New School liberal arts approach and cooperating with other university centers in the city (or the country) that are looking deeper in business and other areas. This is not an easy route where agreement will be consistent and conflicts always avoided. It is rather a journey where the spark of conflicts might give birth and provide a “realness” quality to the brightest of the ideas.