clues posterous

Let's say you want to create the best design school in the world. Period. 

What would your mission look like? Try this:

• Prepare future innovators to be breakthrough thinkers & doers
• Use design thinking to inspire multidiciplinary teams
• Foster radical collaboration between students, faculty and industry
• Tackle big projects and use prototyping to discover new solutions

Now, keep this note in the napkin you wrote it on and you are set to go. The question is, what would people expect your work will be from now on? To come up with the post-Jobs "iSomething" or the 21st century Eames Lounge Chair?

None of that. 

More in line with what you were thinking, is a crowdsourcing project in Kenya that will enable people to locate clean sources of water using mobile phones. Or a low-cost tripod irrigation pump designed for Burma that sold 5.000 units in the first six months. Or, start a hackathon to create tangible prototyping tools to assist activists and change in Egypt. 

This is what the "d.school Institute of Design at Stanford" does. It pools students from public policy, computer science, medicine, engineering - whatever discipline really - and connects them  with nonprofit experts, to offer a learning experience outside a traditional classroom and a curriculum which "pushes design to improve lives", featuring courses with names like "Designing Liberation Techniques" or "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability".

Apparently, students compete for limited seats in the hope that this new experience will lead them outside the confines of a boring career in academia or traditional and conservative business. NextDrop was such a case, a new social enterprise venture which earned a $375.000 grant from the Knight Foundation to refine a system which uses mobile phones to crowdsource an alert system in underdeveloped cities with a severe problem of constant water delivery in homes.

Read more about the d-school in this article, but two questions really come up out of this:

a. Most of the social innovation work seem to be inspired by seeking novel solutions targeted to the under-developing world. One would assume that the significant economic problems that most of us now face in Europe and the US, should lead to the adoption of  the social innovation paradigm to solve more of our immediate issues.

b. Europe seems to be standing on the sidelines of this current surge of interest among students for social innovation. Most of the work and the talent is tapped by US institutions - like Stanford - and much less so by European ones (with the notable exceptions of the Said Business School and INSEAD). Now, this obviously needs to change, if we wish to offer a new perspective to our people, especially in a continent which seems to be severely threatened by recession and a bleak future.