My Smart Partner

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….

christina on February 4, 2005 at 11:24 am

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?

Posted by ak at December 14, 2004 08:37 AM

~~~

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.

Posted by Christina at December 14, 2004 09:39 AM

~~~

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.

Posted by Chris Ford at December 17, 2004 03:49 AM

~~~

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%!!

Posted by Adele Framer at December 23, 2004 01:07 PM

no argument from me!