Victor explains our new company extremely well in While you were out: changes in the global design industry

"Victor Lombardi, a consultant in New York, resigned his fulltime design management job to co-found The Management Innovation Group, a new breed of management consulting firm. "My partners and I view design as a way of thinking which is applicable far beyond the design of products" he explained. "Our clients want to explore innovative business strategies, ways of collaborating, and ultimately to develop their own innovation capabilities." So while Lombardi's firm thinks like designers, they work with executives to help them explore the options a more creative approach can offer. "It's not easy for people to stretch their thinking to encompass both business- and customer-centric points of view, but ultimately this is what we need to do to create innovative, human-centered organizations." "

Watch for more, slowly but steadily....

I don't get how this is supposed to work. A group of information/interaction designers helping to create business management innovation? Am I missing something here?

Isn't this what the big consulting companies were doing but were displaced by smaller, more nimble boutiques that were focused on results rather than process?

perhaps it is a smaller nimbler boutique using design techniques
such as user research, iteration, collaborative creativity to displace
larger management consultancies. We shall see. In general, design is
being seen as more and more critical to business success.

It's certainly a pattern we're seeing emerge in the UK, albeit
slowly. Strangely, it seems to be being lead by the public sector over
here, with a vastly increased interest in understanding what clients /
customers / users want to achieve before undertaking design and
technical specifications.

We're also seeing an increased interest in early research efforts to try and ensure that services aren't duplicated across different governmental bodies. This seems to be recognised as being as design task to some degree.

I wonder whether our ability as an industry to respond to this increasing awareness of the importance of design in the wider business process will depend on our ability to emphasise the potential of the tools we use (the "user research, iteration, collaborative creativity" Christina mentions) to support and influence business and brand strategy.

As a partnership, we try to promote our ability to work alongside other business strands as much as we do our ability to deliver the final product.

The Management Innovation Group sounds like a great idea to me.

Consulting firms don't have any secret sauce. If you've seen them in action, you know their highly hyped and very expensive practices are about 92.3% b.s.

No reason why an information-interaction-experience design approach can't supply the essentials that comprise the other 7.7%!!

no argument from me!

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