First MOD management and design January 2007 - about the initiative

MOD - marketing and management of design, or just management & design, is an education project for and with 3rd year bachelor students run in a new collaboration between BI Norwegian School of Management and the whole Design faculty of KHiO (College of Art in Oslo).
It is realized in Oslo three weeks in January 2007.

Historic initiative: As far as we know, this is the first time business students from BI and design students from the art school in Oslo work together in a formal educational initiative. A few scholars (incl. myself as well as the rector of the art school) have thought about it previously but
it is only now we had a team with energy to just do it!

It is initiated and run by a gang of four:
Halldor Gislasson, dean at KHiO the art school and Tove Kjær, professor also at KHiO, and Donatella de Paoli and myself, both associate professors at BI.
The very good spirit between us four helped to develop this very quickly in the midst of other engagements and without drowning in red tape at the respective schools.

Some background:
Halldor (Dori) the new design dean was eager to do this because he has done this before (since 2001) in Reykjavik, Island and also in London. I had insight from teaching both business and design students in their respective schools, and hearing the live experiences including challenges from similar design/business collaborative education initiatives at Copenhagen Business School, Boston MIT and Stanford with others, and I knew the Oslo Design faculty well through serving on their board and contributing to their strategy group and as evaluator a couple of years ago. I've also organized and taught related courses in concept creation and innovation processes at the BI management school since 1998. Donatella has initiated the new bachelor education in culture and leadership at BI recently and she is their associate dean. We knew each other from higher/doctoral business education in Bergen. Tove had long work and teaching experience in textiles, clothing and fashion design and a huge network as well as personal stamina to do things. Also, I think we're all crossed borders several times previously!

Students were excited about this new initiative:
About 90 students have worked together for three weeks in business & design collaborative education and real life idea/concept development work.
(I think the final figure was 92 students successfully finalized this first MOD 2007 but have to check this, it was 88 in 18 groups but it became popular and more students came along).

18 MOD collaborative groups:
Students have worked in 18 groups developing their self-organized preproject.They presented 18 interesting ideas on Friday 26 January. Hope to present more from this later!