Michael Beirut was invited to a symposium on the creative corporation. Everyone wanted to talk about innovation not design. This reminded me of a story an instructor once told when I was in school. They found that if they used the word design around business people they were less likely to sell their idea or “design”. As Michael states we are all now “innovators”. Shhhhhh it’s not design or maybe call it banana.
“It turned out that the operant word at the symposium wasn’t design but innovation. Yes, innovation. Everyone wanted to know about it. Everyone wanted to talk about it. One of the panelists was Business Week’s legendary design advocate Bruce Nussbaum. “When I talk to my editors about design, I have trouble keeping them interested,” he confessed. “But there’s a tremendous interest in innovation.” The lesson to me seemed clear. If we want the business world to pay attention to us, we need to purge the d-word from our vocabularies. That’s right: we are all innovators now.”
