Minor in Design Business and Strategy

Courses offered as part of the Minor in Design Business and Strategy can only be taken by students signed up for the full minor; they are not offered separately as electives.

This document presents a joint minor between Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation (KADK). The proposal grows out of a memorandum of understanding between CBS and KADK to create a joint educational unit enabling students of both institutions to learn about how management and design practice come together to benefit business organizations.

The collaboration between CBS and KADK brings resources for offering an attractive, credible, theory-thick, and engaging minor in design business and strategy. Each institution stands for 50% of the joint minor, including teaching space, teachers, materials, and exams.

The below table lists the structure and the ECTS credits of the individual courses. The course descriptions are available in the online course catalogue. Direct links are inserted in the below table.

Since the Industrial Revolution, managers have refined their understanding of how to create intended business outcomes with better reliability and efficiency. Resulting management principles, processes, and practices have been very successful in creating societal wealth and raising the standard of living in developed economies. Design has been a part of it all along, yet more in an associative than a collaborative fashion.

More recently, a variety of factors, including technological advance, globalization, and the development of an experience economy have directed attention to a enlarging the set of principles, processes, and practices with those of design. Increasingly, companies look at design as a strategic resource in their struggle for competitive edge. Design moves from a nice-to-have add-on to a defining and guiding element under the constraints of managerial economics. Developing a solid design strategy, and knowledgeably as well as cost-consciously managing a design function becomes essential.

But the close encounter between design and managerial logics is not an easy one. Scores of managers are frustrated with the endless minimal gains that user-driven design can produce, or have become flabbergasted at the proposals of designers, not knowing how they might fit into the existing offerings. Equally, designers find it difficult to understand what drives their management colleagues, and they might feel squeezed into too tight constraints.

Creating value through design is a challenge that requires sound economic logic as much as design savvy. Firms can achieve sustained success only if their business models, organizational structures, and strategic choices are showing a fit for competing on continuous design and commercialization of novel products and services. Equally, designers who understand what firms are made of find it easier to contribute, and develop their practice. The Design Business and Strategy minor will prepare students from design and management to understand the tenets of how design is changing business at the moment, and how to generatively work with designers from a managerial perspective.

The minor consists of the examinations listed below. The learning objectives and the regulations of the individual examinations are prescribed in the online course catalogue. Direct links to the individual examinations are inserted in the table below.

Minor coordinator

Shannon Hessel (she.mpp@cbs.dk) and Tamás Vámosi (tv.om@cbs.dk)

Study Board

The minor in Sustainable Business is offered by the Study Board for the Master of Science Programme
in Economics and Business Administration.

How to sign up

If you want to sign up for the minor in Design Business and Strategy you have to select CCMVM1008U Minor in Design Business when you sign up for electives. You will then subsequently be signed up for all four courses. You do not have to select all four courses individually.