Business factors - For Grads and Undergrads

Our program has always used the Venn diagram (above) that has business factors, technology, and human factors as its three circles. This has always been one of the strengths of our program's philosophy - we are inherently multidisciplinary and recognize business success as an important determinant of design success. For some students, particularly the grad students who can take classes at the Graduate School of Business, getting a business education has been part of their Stanford time, but, frankly, the Design program has not done much to facilitate this experience. If you are an undergrad your business education has been even more haphazard. Stanford does not have an undergraduate business major and the GSB is off-limits, so you are stuck with a few economics classes and the MS&E Department's classes on entrepreneurship to provide you with some (any) business education. We think it is time to fix this.

For the undergrads we are adding a class called ME115c: Business Factors in Design that will be as close to a "mini design MBA" as we can make it. We are talking to several GSB faculty and alumni who have gone on to get MBA's (and even PhD's!) in business about the syllabus and curriculum for this class. This is one of the opportunities for you, our alumni community, to add your two-cents to this discussion -- let us know what you think every designer needs to know about what we are calling business-factors.

Right now we imagine that this is not one of our traditional studio class. However, it will still be based on our "project-based learning" model and the students will still "design" things. It is just that the "things" will be more like costed bills-of-materials, a consulting proposal, a business plan, a brand strategy, and such. if I were to put a straw man up for discussion (and I am) I'd say a class like this needs to cover:

• What is a business strategy?
• How do you finance a product or a company? What is debt and equity?
• How do you structure ownership?
• Understanding sales, marketing, and supply chains
• What is a business model and how do you design/develop one?
• Understanding basic cost accounting? How do products and services make money?

We plan to develop a similar class for the graduate students, probably delivered through the d.school. We are also actively reviewing the appropriate GSB and MS&E classes and plan to create a list of "approved sequences" that would fulfill a "business factors" requirement that will be part of the new grad curriculum. More about that in a subsequent post.