MANAGING THE UNKNOWN – DESIGN THEORY AND METHODS FOR INNOVATION

This 30-hour face-to-face course, held during PSL Week in November 2024 (25.11 to 29.11), is an in-depth introduction to managing the unknown with the support of design theory. Contemporary issues of managing transitions (climate, energy, mobility, digitial…) and managing crisis (pandemia, inflation, energy prices, war…) call for a capacity to organize collective action in the unknown – this capacity is expected from all kinds of managers, and in particular scientists, engineers, and designers. The capacity is today more easily acquired thanks to the advances in design theory. Design theory brings solid foundation for designing transition and designing resilient solutions to face contemporary crises. These approaches are essential today for those who wish to train in the management of innovation, scientific entrepreneurship, and the management of contemporary transitions. The course alternates between theoretical lessons in the morning and practical workshops in the afternoon. Practitioners are invited to speak about their experience of design in various areas (business, science, art). Main notions: In the end of the course, participants should have acquired the following capacities:

• On design reasoning: capacity to build a simple C-K; capacity to evaluate a C-K (main notions: C-space, K-space, operators, double expansion)
• On knowledge for generativity: capacity to learn and develop knowledge for generativity (main notions: independent knowledge, splitting knowledge)
• On leadership for defixation: capacity to give relevant input to help team members to overcome their own fixation (main notions: fixations, defixation)
• On economic evaluation in design: capacity to rely on economics criteria for improved exploration (main notions: design of decision, design for genericity, the value of knowledge in design activity)
• On organization of collective design: capacity to rely on and make relevant use of R&D capacities in companies, capacity to organize innovative design processes (main notions: organization principles of rule-based and innovative design, dominant design, KCP processes)
• On design and ecosystems: introduction to “double impact” research and “mission-driven” companies.