DMI Review, Vol. 21, No. 2 features Jeanne Liedtka's latest article about  one of current hot topics in business. The professor, Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia, underlines remarkable contributions and limitations in collaborations of business leaders and designers.

Almost everybody knows that design is not just for products anymore. It has even been discovered by business strategists—and that’s a dynamic that works both ways. Traditional design firms, such as IDEO, are expanding into business strategy consulting. Traditional strategy consulting firms, such as Monitor & Company, are teaming with such leading design firms as Doblin. Something is clearly afoot.

Yet there has been surprisingly little attention to the why of this union, beyond the usual rhetoric of exploiting user-centered approaches in order to achieve greater innovation. If this marriage is to succeed, the partners surely need to know more about each other than that. Most business executives have no idea what design means if it doesn’t involve the iPod. And if business thinking is to be taken seriously by designers, it must mean something more than a pejorative label standing in for adjectives the likes of stodgy.

Having fallen in love with the idea of designing a decade ago, and after spending most of my life as an academic and consultant on the business strategy side, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. The differences are indeed profound and go far beyond being user-centered or not. Here are my shorthand views on the differences between the two approaches and why we need each other.

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