Design is at the heart of innovation, whether it is the Dyson vacuum cleaner, or Trevor Baylis’s clockwork radio. But Britain needs a lot more successes such as these if it is to compete in a global economy, according to Nick Leon, the director of Tanaka Business School’s newly opened innovation centre, Design London.

Leon is on a mission to reshape the MBA, with its traditional focus on management and finance, by injecting a hefty dose of creativity and by encouraging students to work with designers, scientists and engineers.

MBA students will spend time learning approaches to creative problem-solving from industrial designers and they will help budding designers and innovators to launch products and businesses. Leon says: “My message to MBA students is if you just want to optimise your professional and managerial skills then please go somewhere else. We want our students to understand the power of design within the new businesses they are creating.”

Having studied industrial design at the Royal College of Art (RCA) under Sir Hugh Casson and Sir Mischa Black, a leading light behind the Festival of Britain, Leon went straight into IBM where he designed the keyboard for the first PC. After, as he puts it, “flip-flopping between research and development and business”, Leon was called in as a troubleshooter when IBM’s business began to stagnate in the early 1990s. He brought his design skills to bear in reengineering the business – setting up a direct sales operation, IBM Direct (now IBM.com).

As part of Imperial College, Tanaka has a track record of creative collaboration to draw on, in the shape of the masters in industrial design run jointly by Imperial and the Royal College of Art. Design London staff will teach on the masters and the MBA, increasing the level of cross-fertilisation between the neighbouring institutions.

Jeremy Myerson, director of innovation and professor of design studies at the RCA, believes close collaboration with the Tanaka MBA programme can only be beneficial. “Design London is not a separate organisation. It is the glue that draws us together. Traditionally design has been taught on MBA programmes, but not in a profound or integrated way,” he says.

“Design London will encourage a project-based approach to industrial design – working with real companies, designing real products and services.” Tanaka’s Design London is costing £5.8 million to set up, a sum that includes a £3.8 million grant from the higher education funding council for England and a further £900,000 from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts. The funding comes in the wake of the Cox Review of Creativity in Business produced for the Treasury by Sir George Cox, chairman of the Design Council, in 2005. The new centre will enhance existing postgraduate degrees, and students on the MA and the MEng as well as the MBA will benefit from new modules on industrial design.

Other business schools are likely to adopt some of the techniques adopted by Design London. Lancaster University Management School, for example, will be launching a new elective in design this year. Oliver Westall, the MBA programme director at Lancaster says the university is bringing contemporary arts, fine arts, music and design together into a new research centre called the Imagination Laboratory. “It will enable our MBA students to engage with design academics to get inside the creative thought processes designers go through when solving problems.”

According to Myerson, the inclusion of arts, science and business was the orthodoxy when Britain led the world in industrial design in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851. He says: “The Great Exhibition’s legacy, South Kensington campus – which included Imperial College, the Royal College of Music and the Royal College of Art – was part of Prince Albert’s vision to draw the arts and the sciences closer together. It is only in the 20th century that the disciplines started drifting apart.”

Incubation period may prevent new product going up in smoke

Launched last October at Tanaka Business School, Design London is the first innovation and creativity hub to be opened in the UK.

Close on its heels, Cranfield School of Management has announced plans to open a similar creativity hub, the centre for Competitive Creative Design (C4D), in partnership with the University of the Arts London.

With a brief to boost the UK’s competitiveness in global markets, innovation hubs will bring design, engineering, science and business students closer together with MBA students, playing a key role in helping to identify and create products that have the potential to reach mass markets.

Design London is based at the Imperial College campus in South Kensington. It includes an incubator unit for design-based start-up companies, where MBA students will give budding entrepreneurs help with business planning, marketing and securing venture capital and intellectual property rights. Design London may, like other incubators, take an equity stake in the new venture.

Rebecca Minnit, an industrial designer, is looking forward to advice from Tanaka MBA students when she puts together her new business plan. Minnit is a graduate of Imperial College and the Royal College of Art, and her product is the Niko Pipe, a stylish brushed aluminium holder for the nicotine cartridges.

“I launched the product last July when Britain’s public places went smoke-free, and have sold 400 at £18 each through a website that I set up with my partner,” she says.

Her plan is to persuade drug companies that market nicotine cartridges to allow them to be sold under licence in pubs and restaurants. At the moment the cartridges are available only through chemists.

Minnit and her partner raised the money themselves for prototyping and a first production run of 1,000 pipes. Now she needs business advice and a kindly “angel”.

She says: “We can either go and talk to a big brand name who can buy us out or build a brand big enough for me to develop a portfolio of products aimed at healthy lifestyle.”

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