In today’s competitive world, organisations need a design-driven and innovative mindset to survive and thrive. From businesses to experiences, services to systems, everything is changing at an unprecedented pace and career opportunities for management candidates are also growing.
Management students are trained in functional areas such as marketing, finance or HR, which prepares them to be productive. However, the key faculty of management studies is design strategy that focuses on creative planning, efficiently designing, developing and executing a strategy.
Design and innovation provide a deeper understanding of how to administer various strategies, keeping in mind the organisation’s goals, functions, and economics while ensuring a great end-user experience. These subjects encourage students to create highly valuable and innovative work environments that benefit individuals and inspire imaginative and creative workplaces.
As creators of tomorrow, we need to understand the fundamentals of design in management, social behaviour, entrepreneurship, gamification, and develop strategies for services and systems and creative strategic leadership.
Programme and scope
In our ever-changing world, design is the fundamental element of planning and strategy for every business. Ultimately, it is good design — be it in the product, the experience, or the technology — that truly differentiates an innovative organisation from the rest.
In-depth research has shown that organisations need learning programmes in applied design, strategy, and innovation to address real-world challenges. Businesses today require the ability to create opportunity out of the vague, tangibility out of the intangible, and create worth and wealth out of limitations. This can only be accomplished by the ability to constantly reinvent, innovate, and ‘design’ business strategies, processes, tools, and techniques.
Therefore people who have the ability to design contextually relevant imaginative, creative, transformational, and intuitive strategies, business processes, tools, and techniques are essential. A practice-oriented school that encourages students to take industry-driven challenges and create phenomenal methods, concepts, and ideas will stretch the human imagination with best practices in design, innovation, strategy, and creative leadership. At the same time, management schools need to offer insights and tools that make problem solvers more collaborative, effective, and resilient, and changemakers to apply design to everything they do from ideation to creation. Design strategy can build thought leaders and a new breed of managers who can help organisations achieve their strategic goals and maximise worth from business.
Career prospects
In the post-COVID-19 world, organisations need a workforce that has been trained to think in design terms. This will help drive sustained success in physical service and digital settings, in no particular order.
To re-imagine business, renovate systems and recreate value in the new normal, organisations need dynamic visionaries, changemakers, and pathbreakers to positively embrace and create disruptions. Therefore, with the transforming industry trends, job opportunities in Design Strategy are set to witness continued demand in India.
The writer is the Vice President, Manipal Global Education Services
