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By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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GRAND RAPIDS — The greater West Michigan area has a reputation for having great and innovative companies that “want to use design” to succeed, said Patrick Whitney, dean of the Institute of Design and Steelcase Robert C. Pew professor at Illinois Institute of Technology. The region is recognized as a design center for furniture, but there’s a strong desire to spread design thinking outside of that sector, as evidenced by the many executives from West Michigan who’ve been through the ID program in Chicago.

Now, those leaders won’t have to travel to Chicago to take courses. IIT’s Institute of Design now offers its master of design methods degree at GRid70, a design center opened in 2010 as a collaboration among a host of companies, including Amway Corp., Steelcase Inc., Wolverine World Wide Inc. and Meijer Inc.

“Grand Rapids has a great history of furniture design. We hope we can help make it a center for design in other areas,” Whitney told MiBiz.

ID has many local connections. Executives at many of the companies housed at GRid70 have completed the program. Whitney’s position at IIT is named after a former president of Steelcase North America, and Whitney counts current Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett as a friend.

The program’s focus aims at the heart of business needs in the region. The design instruction need not be confused with an arts program, he said. Too often, companies just give customers what they want, whereas what they need to do is “surprise them with innovation,” Whitney said. A shift from a product-controlled value chain to a user-controlled value chain has meant economies of scale are now economies of choice, and companies need to pay attention.

The old days when companies won or lost on their manufacturing costs are over.

“The battle now is about serving users in ways that surprise them,” Whitney said. “It can work for all companies, but it works best for those that have a user experience. You can aim it at internal (groups), but it’s most common for (those companies relying on) people buying stuff.”

The faculty for the design program — currently scheduled for two weekends a month — will be the same as those teaching the program in Chicago. Whitney said ID wants to maintain its core identity and quality no matter where the courses are taught.

Courses are open to those who’ve led an innovation team for at least a year, although enrollees don’t necessarily have to come from a design-related field. It’s open to service industries — law, for instance — as well as manufacturing and other product-driven industries.

Whitney said ID wants to have about 25 people enrolled at a time in Grand Rapids. The company doesn’t actively market its new offerings, and instead relies on referrals from alumni. That tactic leads the ideal candidates to ID’s offerings, Whitney said.

One alumnus instrumental in helping bring ID to Grand Rapids was Seth Starner, manager of business innovation consulting at Amway. About two years ago when Starner was going through the program in Chicago, he brought up to Whitney the idea of hosting a satellite program in Grand Rapids because he thought there would be no problem getting enrollees from around the region. The timing fit, since ID was discussing expanding its reach beyond Chicago, Starner said. About the same time, Amway and its partners were readying plans for GRid70, which would serve as a perfect home for the program.

Amway has been working internally on its concept of human centered design, which moves away from simply answering consumers’ needs with known solutions to truly examining needs by getting around preconceived filters, said Glenn Armstrong, VP of innovations at Amway.

“Real insights come through human centered design,” Armstrong told MiBiz.

More than three years ago, teams at Amway began working with design and innovation consulting firm IDEO to find new ways of approaching the business. But while the IDEO program was valuable, Armstrong said the “incredibly powerful” lessons learned through ID go further in helping slowly change the culture within the company.

“We want to continue to build Grand Rapids as a design place. It’s not about Amway — this helps our community,” Armstrong said.

ID joins a host of new design-related education opportunities in West Michigan that have developed over the last couple of years. NewNorth Center for Design in Business started in 2010 in Holland as an executive education program teaching design processes to spur new innovations. Kendall College of Art and Design initiated a MBA certificate in design and innovation management to teach businesspeople the process of design thinking as well as to help designers learn how to better communicate with business executives. Moreover, Kendall is also developing a BFA in design collaboration, a degree aimed at giving students broad design knowledge useful across fields.

Those educational opportunities are layered on top of the work of Design West Michigan, an organization intended to help define West Michigan as a design-centric region.

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TAGS:

• amway
• education
• glenn armstrong
• grand rapids
• grid70
• institute of design
• jim hackett
• meijer
• midesign
• newnorth center for design in business