Stanford’s Institute of Design, or D-school, has been established to teach design-thinking and strategy to business, engineering and design students. In fact, every top MBA school (or B-school), from Wharton, and Haas, to INSEAD, is partnering with a design school, art school, or a consulting firm like IDEO, to stretch its students beyond traditional ‘business administration’.

Makes me wonder, in a business world that is placing ever more value on innovation and creativity is the D-school the new B-school? From my experience, design thinking and methodologies based on insight, experimentation and prototyping can be an excellent contrast and complement to analytic thinking and frameworks, which are mostly data and planning based. Both lead to innovation, but of different kinds.

D-school assumes, of course, that it’s possible to learn creativity, through instruction and practice. Or to put it another way, that it’s possible to un-learn the mistrust we develop for our instinct, our curiosity, our emotions.

Last week, I heard about a group of Stanford’s D-school alumni who had taken a ‘Design for Extreme Affordability’ class together and started a company taking their product to market: a low-cost LED light to replace smoky kerosene lamps in the developing world. Already they have won a $250K competition run by early stage venture fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Will be interesting to watch them go… if I’ve learnt one thing from designers, it’s to defer judgement.

Here are some more design-thinking tips from ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation‘ by IDEO’s Tom Kelly.

How to Observe with the Skill of an Anthropologist:
1. Practice the Zen principle of “beginner’s mind” — they have the wisdom to observe with a truly open mind.
2. Embrace human behavior with all its surprises. Don’t judge, empathize.
3. Draw inferences by listening to your intuition. Don’t be afraid to draw on your own instincts when developing hypotheses about the emotional underpinnings of observed human behavior.
4. Seek out epiphanies through a sense of “vuja de.” Vuja de is the opposite of déjà vu. It’s a sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have witnessed it many times before.
5. Search for clues in the trash bin. Look for insights where they’re least expected — before customers arrive, after they leave, even in the garbage. Look beyond the obvious, and seek inspiration in unusual places.