Desperate to innovate, companies are turning to design schools for nimble, creative thinkers. Instead of asking a business school for help, Mozilla turned to Stanford's "D-school," as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design is termed on campus.
A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them.
Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers.
B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.
