Over the last decade, design practice has made major inroads into how organizations and inter-organizational networks are developed and managed; creative companies like IDEO, Google, Alessi, 3M, and Lego are placing it at the center of how they do business. While it started in areas like service and product design, these are now being supplemented by design-based approaches to strategy, new ventures, branding, organizational structure, operating processes (e.g. designing meetings), communication, job development, production, reward systems, and information systems. Such thinking and practice differs radically from classical organization design—whereas organization design has been driven solely by scientific considerations, today’s great enterprise designs “delight, deliver and deepen” in equal measure, and achieving all three requires skill in toggling between the scientific, artistic, and the utilitarian.

In Creative Enterprise Design, we are bringing economic science and design processes together in a carefully considered way that creates value for organizations. The aim is the better design of organizations, networks, and institutions.

The purpose of this course is to (a) give students a general overview of enterprise design, (b) provide students with the basic visual, tactile, and performative methodological skills, and (c) give an opportunity for problem-based learning through application of the gained knowledge and skills in an ongoing enterprise design project. The project will come from the portfolio of the recently started Creative Enterprise Design (CED) platform at CBS, which aims at solving business-in-society problems through cross-disciplinary, applied work.

The course's development of personal competences:

Students will become more proficient at:
• using creative “out of the box” thinking methods
• balancing and integrating artful and scientific research and framing approaches
• learning when and how to use particular inquiry approaches
• developing desirable solutions to real-world enterprise-level problems
• presenting to real-world users
• teamwork and project management
• working with complex data

And apply these skills to
• design noteworthy organizational structures and processes that delight, deliver and deepen
• become attentive to process complexities—how personalities, company histories, context, and inertia interact, and how these can be worked with

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