Why Choose MDI?
For the last few years, leading industry commentators have identified innovation as one of the key differentiators in the market place. In fact, according to some experts, for companies that cannot innovate and speedily bring new products and services to market, the future looks bleak.
In a bid to identify how best to equip tomorrow’s corporate leaders with the skills to innovate, a debate has ensued pitting ‘B’ Schools against ‘D’ Schools and engineering know-how against design intuition. Our view on this debate is quite simple; no one discipline owns innovation. As Harry West, vice president for strategy and innovation at Continuum stated in Business Week “…innovation often happens not in the centre of a discipline but in the space between disciplines...”
We believe that innovation is what happens when people come together and close the space between the disciplines by being open to new ways of thinking and doing. They do this by being prepared to step out of their comfort zones, asking questions and listening to differing perspectives.
The problem is that traditionally, industry and education are structured in a linear way, which doesn’t encourage different disciplines to work together. The result is that students and employees may build incredible levels of expertise in their own field but are unwilling or unable to communicate with their colleagues in other faculties or departments.
We developed Multidisciplinary Design Innovation MA/MSc precisely to help overcome these ‘innovation barriers’. The whole objective of this course is to allow students to develop their core skills while increasing their understanding of the other two disciplines and enhancing their self awareness and team working skills. This is done through a combination of working on real world projects with leading companies such as Unilever and Mars, and reflecting on their own role and performance within each project.
The end result is a graduate who has creative confidence, commercial acumen, knows how to humanize technology and can work with other disciplines to get the job done. Companies around the globe such as Visa, Proctor and Gamble, Samsung and Harley-Davidson, are already placing students from interdisciplinary master’s programmes on their must-see recruitment lists. We believe that our graduates will be at the top of those lists.
