Two days after listening to David Teece, I am back at Göteborg’s Handelshögskolan in Malmstensaalen (the Audimax). We arrived only just in Time for the food break as Jan Ljungberg had another meeting to attend before.

First, Ulla Johansson, talked about Design Management History o frontlinjer (på svenska), talked about Design Managers from Josiah Wedgwood, the first design manager in the industry to Alberto Alessi.
Alledgedly did design management not exist before. I kind of doubt that, just the same way that companies did not do strategy (implicitly) before the 1050’s :-))

Switch to English, (www.bdl.gu.se). Mary Jo Hatch (an ethnographer, and Organization Theorist) gave the talk titled "Death to All Concepts".
What does Art and Design offer to Management and the other way around?

She showed pictures of drawings by 5-year old kids. One does by a normal child (stick figures), and one by an autistic child (lookks like a very technical drawing with extremly many details). Wow.

She is a sympathetic and a good speaker.

She is sick of "method vultures" that create new concepts. These crave exact definitions of your concepts. Method vultures can descend upon your definitions and can feed on them. The more you can abstract the meaning away from the data, the more you can generalizability.

It’s unproductive, she pleads to create to space where art and design can help Business. Art and Design bring a creativity that Businesses need, but that conventional thinking can not give.

Actually, I found it a bit of a pity to give talks in Swedish, when the final Keynote speaker can not understand a word of Swedish (and mentioned that).