UK gets it - D-School; does the US?

Thanks to Bruce Nussbaum for his blog posting on the new Dyson School of Design Innovation in the UK. As Nussbaum points out, while the US gets it, the US does not:

There is a huge amount of public policy work going on in Europe in the space of innovation, design and creativity. I fear that in the U.S., we are stuck in a rut of the federal government defining innovation just in terms of technology and pouring more money into engineering, science and math (yes, it's a good thing but only necessary, not nearly sufficient). Washington sponsors the annual National Design Awards contest through the Cooper Hewitt and that is a good thing too (lunch with Laura Bush was today, Monday. This year Nike won, as did MOMA's Paola Antonelli and 2x4, Maria Cornejo, Bill Stumpf and others. But the National Design Awards program could use more focus (do they go for lifetime achievement or to current great projects or to what?). I think the awards are a wonderful thing but what, as a nation, do we want to reward in design?

Washington doesn't get it on several fronts:

Invention does not automatically equate to innovation and technology and science do not automatically equate to creativity. Europe--meaning Britain, Scandanavia, the Netherlands and Italy in particular, do get design. They get it in terms of education, in terms of effecting social policy, in terms of generating economic growth, jobs and wealth. We really need to work on this in the U.S. It's not just about more money for design. It's about thinking about design thinking.

Needless to say, agree wholeheartedly -- see my piece U.K. Leads; U.S. Lags. But I am hopeful that the trio of Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto; David Kelly, the Design Engineering Professor at Stanford and founder of the D-School; and Patrick Whitney, the Director of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology can change our perspective.

In that regard, Athena Alliance held a congressional briefing on Innovation and Design last month. The summary and the speaker's presentations (Roger Martin and John W. Leikhim, Director, Corporate Innovation Capability at Procter & Gamble) are now available at our website.

The Dyson School of Design Innovation, in contrast, will focus on function-led, problem-solving design. With a breathtaking six-story building planned for the banks of the river in downtown Bath, the school will include a café, design center, and a library complete with a collection of prototypes. Dyson's hope is that the school will be a prototype for many more to come.