I recall seeing a few BusinessWeek articles in the past about design education, but now BusinessWeek has rolled out a great special report  all about design schools, including a ranking of the world’s top design schools. It’s got articles about the schools, about the designers and about the companies that are incorporating more design thinking and practice into their business. I think my favorite read is the article “The Cross-Discipline Design Imperative.” It speaks more directly about design thinking than just about any other article in the special report. From the article:

The word “design” has different meanings in these different schools, and as these meanings intersect, design becomes bigger, something that sits well above vocational skills and techniques. Design is a set of principles and ways of thinking that help us to manage and create in the material world. It values creativity as much as analysis. It is a way of seeing and painting a new, bigger picture…Now business schools and other interdisciplinary graduate programs are entering the fray under the banner of “:design thinking.” They have recognized that the creative principles found in design can be used to develop new solutions for business—and they see this as the next cutting edge…There is a tremendous demand for design thinkers today. In industry and in consulting, those who can marry creative right-brain thinking and analytical left-brain thinking are at a premium. That’s because innovation often happens not in the center of a discipline but in the space between disciplines, and right now a lot of new value is being found at the intersection of design and business.

So grab the issue off your library shelf or take a look at what’s available online. There’s some pretty good reading here.