Heather Fraser likes to keep her options open. That's why every piece of furniture in her office—a Victorian townhouse that serves as headquarters for the Rotman School of Management's Business Design initiative—is on wheels.
On this day, the place has been transformed into a lecture hall that's crammed with a mixture of Rotman MBAs and students from Toronto's Ontario College of Art and Design who are participating in the program. Part of Rotman's campaign to become the innovator in business education, the initiative aims to help the CEOs of tomorrow tackle business issues in a more holistic way. "We're not here to make one product better or squeeze costs out of the system," says Fraser,
the program's director. "It's about being user-centric, taking risks, prototyping, then embracing new possibilities. These things are natural for a designer. They're also natural for a successful business."
Fraser's been perfecting the backbone of the program, the "Three Gears," for years. In 1979, the Michigan native joined Procter & Gamble's Canadian consumer research department. "My job was to understand what makes people tick," she says. Fraser moved to the Toronto ad agency Taxi in 1989 and, 15 years later, began exploring the concept of a business-design program with Rotman dean Roger Martin. "By not filtering anything out early in the process," she says, "we can come up with a dream concept. Then we find out how to turn it into a competitive advantage."
In the spring of 2007, Eugene Grichko, an industrial design student from OCAD, and Rotman grad Mark Leung put Fraser's program into action. Their goal: Improve the experience of cancer patients at Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital.
GEAR 1 DEEP USER UNDERSTANDING
Grichko and Leung spent weeks hanging around PMH. "We'd sit in the waiting room and learn what it's like to be in that chair for five or six hours," says Leung. "We interviewed dozens of patients and looked for patterns of need." Then, he and Grichko distilled what they'd learned into five core needs—all of them related to reducing anxiety and providing hope. "Not everybody is going to be cured," says Leung. "But they all want something to look forward to at the end of the day."
GEAR 2 IDEATION AND PROTOTYPING
The team sat down with 20 PMH staffers—managers, surgeons, nurses and support workers. "The idea of brainstorming is to have no limits—think big," says Leung. The 60-minute workshop yielded 300 ideas, including providing Internet access, roving manicurists, even robot servants. Many of the ideas revolved around wait times, which range from 20 minutes to eight hours, sometimes every day for four months. "Our challenge," says Leung, "was to knit them together into the ideal patient story."
GEAR 3 STRATEGIC BUSINESS DESIGN
Grichko and Leung asked two key questions: "What do we need, and what's possible?" The answer was simple: to create a better waiting-room chair. Their dream chair would have better wheels, lines for oxygen and water, extra padding and space to accommodate laptops. "It's the first step to greatly improving the experience of the patient," says Leung, "because wait times aren't going away." PMH and a donor are now working on a prototype.
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