Reflections at the end of year 1

The Generator has now been running for 12 months

Background.
The Generator was created because the School of Design had identified (through their on-going dialogue with design practitioners) a clear and growing need for design graduates to have more effective business understanding. The School wanted to find ways in which the entrepreneurial spirit might be nurtured among design students and introduce them to the experiences of existing creative businesses. They also wanted to respond to calls from the design industry for new designers who are able to set up their own business successfully or are ready to work with business.
Further, we felt that some creative people, though they may not know it, have the capacity to be entrepreneurs with a natural business sense. The Design School wanted to help bring these latent skills out into the open and help them blossom.

The last 12 months.
The Generator was designed to try to find these naturally creative business people and nurturetheir commercial know-how. Certainly, designers are particularly well placed to develop entrepreneurial skills. They are by definition creative thinkers who in their training often think about and work with the products of business – consumer goods, engineering products, buildings, communications, graphics, etc. They come to the business table from a different angle to most business students in that they come from the creative side, but that’s all to the good, because creativity has never been more important in business than it is today. A designer with a good head for business is very likely to make a good business person, especially capable of generating powerful new product and service concepts and business ideas. It is clear that the Generator has provided a useful model for helping young design entrepreneurs, and has further highlighted the benefits that accrue to design students if they are exposed early and in an engaging way to business training. But there is resistance to business training in design education. Many design students have no immediate desire to start their own business, and many other students consider business training to be either irrelevant or boring. This may partly be because such training is rarely embedded and assessed as part of core design activity. Some design teaching staff share the same negative view of business teaching, feeling that college work should concentrate on developing students’ creativity and improving their conceptual thinking.
Proponents of business education in design schools argue that creative training in design education is obviously vital, but that it should be given a business context since business is most likely to be its end use. Many art and design schools offer business modules. The trick is to make them engaging and useful. The Generator may help show how this can be done.
One of the most important future features of of the Generator will be that members will receive the opportunity to network and to learn to network with peers across all design disciplines, with peers from other design schools, with practising designers, and with mentors,industry gurus and potential employers.

The future?
It is now becoming well established that when students engage with people outside the confines of their own school of study, their learning is amplified, and that breaking down the barriers between the various design disciplines is generally beneficial. One of the most important features of the Generator is that it welcomes graduates with different backgrounds in the creative industries. Another key features of the Generator has been the graduates’ discovery and development of entrepreneurial skills. There is a case, it can be argued, for introducing Generator thinking into business modules and even core courses, this way students could more readily engage with designs commercial context, even if they have no plans to start a business of their own.