From Drawing Board to Boardroom: Design Goes to B-School

Businesses have learned that to reap the market rewards of true innovation, their bottom-line-focused executives must embrace the value of design.

To this end, top global business schools such as Harvard, UCLA, USC, Stanford, Northwestern, and Insead are now teaching design strategy.

Leading the charge in this new collaboration is RKS, a world-class industrial design firm whose Psycho-Aesthetics design strategy has so demonstrated its effectiveness in creating measurable business results as to have become the focus of a Harvard Business School Case Study.

Professor Elie Ofek of the Harvard Business School invited Ravi Sawhney, CEO, and Ingvald Smith-Kielland, VP of Strategy, to teach Psycho-Aesthetics as part of Harvard's core marketing curriculum in Ofek's Marketing & Innovation class.

Designers and business leaders have long spoken different languages and circulated in different circles.

What was missing was a way for both groups find common ground and leverage their combined talents to achieve new market successes.

Psycho-Aesthetics speaks in a language that's easily understandable by both business executives and design teams.

This RKS-developed strategic tool translates the consumer's emotional needs into quantifiable data for management analysis and evaluation, and ultimately transforms these insights into market-building designs and innovations.