Former Microsoft Director Surya Vanka talks design and innovation

Last month the Graduate School of Business and Law hosted Surya Vanka, a global leader in hardware and software design, design strategy, and design capability development for an exciting public lecture.

Vanka drew on his experience as Director of User Experience at Microsoft, founder of design consultancy Authentic and as a Professor of Design at the University of Illinois, to unpack why design has been the primary driver of innovation in the last decade.

With reference to a broad range of industry trends and developments he explored the topic, touching in particular detail on:

• The important role of design capability maturity models to assess strengths and gaps and prioritize design investments
• A four stage design maturity model by which design goes from being optional and niche to becoming the core competitive advantage for an organization
• His own work with the Design Management Institute in the development of a new Design Value Framework
• How an organization can strategically build its design capability in the three distinction zones of design literacy, design fluency and design mastery

A primary assertion made by Vanka was that as the world becomes more uncertain, it gets harder to predict the future. He argued that given this, new innovation methods are needed that are tuned to designing for scale and for extreme uncertainty

One such technique, called design swarming, brings together the empathy of design thinking and the agility of hackathons to create disruptive innovation in what he described as “high velocity design with, and by, stakeholders.”

Story: Grace Taylor