Stephen P. Anderson recently put together a primer on this topic. What business leaders are slowly becoming aware of is that it’s not good enough to be more efficient or feature rich. They need a new tool for a post-industrial world. One that leads to innovation. Design thinking is traditionally a part of the process that delivers great products and artifacts. Take that to a higher level and you can be designing ecosystems where many products and services live. This is knowledge that is vital for companies in a new frontier of competition.

This is why we’re seeing traditional B.Schools like Rotman promote their integrative thinking toolkit as a main differentiator.

Anyway have a breeze through these slides you should come out of it with a better understanding of “design” as a verb not a noun

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A new prototyping tool on the horizon from adobe:

” ‘Thermo‘ is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Features:

• Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wireframe an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools.
• Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
• Define and wire up interactive behavior, such as what to do when a user clicks on something, without having to write code.
• Easily design UIs that work with dynamic data, such as a list of contacts or product information, without having access to the actual data source. Design-time sample data can be used as a realistic placeholder when laying out an application, testing interactivity, and choreographing motion.

Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.”

See a demo from Adobe MAX Chicago. I haven’t looked through it yet but thought I’d share