The Power of Design in Business

At the same time, the human capacity for innovation, for collaborating to design and deliver new vaccines and treatments, tracking systems, and new ways of working, shown during the crisis, gives many reasons to be optimistic about the future—a design led future.

Launching its new Business Design Initiative, Rotman School of Management’s one day virtual conference, Business Design eXchange: Decoding Design for Innovation—epitomizing our new way of working—focused on how business design is key to leading the transformative change now so clearly needed to develop sustainable futures for organizations and society at large.

As noted by co-presenter Clay Chandler, Executive Editor, Asia, Fortune: “the pandemic makes the design conversation more relevant than ever.” Design, as participant Scott Anthony, Senior Partner, Innosight, anticipated can be the way we “convert fear into the fuel for the ‘new possible.”

This motivating and highly informative conference, hosted by Rotman’s Angèle Beausoleil, brought together an impressive group of design voices—global business leaders and design practitioners from many backgrounds and places around the world.

To some extent the conference was preaching, if not to the converted, by the converted. However, the core message that design should be the watchword for organizational renewal and sustainability, when so many companies are preoccupied with survival and maintaining performance, is a critical one for all business leaders.

Design has the power, according to product design executive John S. Couch, author of The Art of Creative Rebellion, “to pre-visualize the future.” It is, said Chandler, “a lens for creating clarity.”

Enjoy watching this abridged version of the conference: