When creative types meet business-school types ...

IN 2015, Disney South-east Asia executives made the short trek over to the Insead campus to take part in a collaboration with Insead MBA students and exchange design students from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Students worked in the manner of a design start-up, whose "client" happened to be one of the biggest brands on earth.

Disney's challenge was wide open: Develop a new product, service or experience concept as part of the brand's expansion into new Asian markets. The interdisciplinary teams of MBAs and designers were given just four weeks to wow the executives with their creations.

Brainstorming aids

They toyed with the physical classroom environment, creating a workspace unlike anyplace else on the campus. Orderly rows were replaced by cluster seating to facilitate close collaboration; whiteboards on wheels were on hand to aid in brainstorming. Lego sets and bean bag chairs, among many other playful touches, encouraged an atmosphere of child-like creativity.

Teams took turns being cultural stewards by adding something new to the space each week. MBA student Angela Ang recalled: "One week, there was an installation of toilet paper that read 'Don't Be Afraid To Have Shitty Ideas'." Elsewhere in the space, Disney-inspired photo collages and images of Disney characters gave a sense of full-on immersion in the brand's core values.

Values that travel

From the outset, the brand was adamant that it wouldn't be enough to put an image of a Disney character on a cool new product. Disney wanted a truly innovative solution that would organically extend its core brand values into a specific Asian market. Students would have mere days to choose a target market and complete customer insighting.

Disney South-east Asia's managing director Robert Gilby said: "Asia is a wonderfully diverse landscape. It's important not to assume there is one Asia... Localisation to us is customisation. It's speaking to customers within their own culture, not just language, but in values relevant to their society. Most of Disney's core values, because they are so positive, will travel across diverse markets."

With the Art Center designers leading the way, the teams embarked on a rapid ideating process. Led by their business background to believe there was only one right answer to a problem, some MBAs struggled to let unrefined or unworkable ideas out into the world.

Ms Ang said: "I guess that's how you approach it when you're an entrepreneur. You birth one idea and you're super-passionate about it as opposed to coming up with 20 ideas or 80 ideas." Ang says her team ultimately compiled a spreadsheet with 77 basic concepts, including consumer products, mobile apps and even a television show - then voted on the top five ideas to present to Disney.

Simplest is best

Art Center student India Hillis, who was on the same team as Ang, said: "A lot of the teams felt strongly about one idea, but Disney might say that the idea wouldn't work well with the brand or would suggest combining two ideas."

In the end, the simplest idea in Ms Hillis and Ms Ang's spreadsheet was the one Disney liked best. Through iteration, the team continued to simplify the concept, shedding unnecessary features as they moved toward the final pitch.

Mr Gilby said that the iteration phase - in which ideas may repeatedly cycle through various testing and evaluation stages - is largely where both the magic and the discipline of design come in. Iteration has been at the heart of Disney's creative process since the beginning, he said. "One of my creative partners says: 'Creativity and innovation: put them together, you get "creation".' We saw the students go through that process."

Creative tension

Ang and Hillis agree that learning to work with people from such a vastly different background was a rewarding experience, but not without challenges.

Ms Hillis said: "Designers would find themselves explaining something to the MBAs, and you would feel that you shouldn't have to explain it. It should be obvious. But then 10 seconds later, it would be the opposite. MBAs would say: 'Why aren't you guys just getting it?' "

Fairly quickly, though, the two camps found common ground, said Ms Ang. "[Designers and MBAs] are all very driven and very competitive. In some sense, I felt the designers were even more competitive than we were!"

Mr Gilby said that by the final pitches, the teams worked together so smoothly that he would not have been able to tell which school the students came from. "It was really attractive how they came together as teams...The pitches were just fantastic - it was more like being in a Disney boardroom than in a university."

Final analysis

The realism of the Insead/Art Center/Disney collaboration may have made it a prime example of the "two-sided innovation" called for by author Mark Payne in his 2014 book How to Kill a Unicorn. He asserts that design thinking cannot realise its potential without a solid underpinning of business strategy. The left and right sides of the brain must be working in tandem from the beginning, or as he terms it, "designing the consumer proposition and the business proposition at the same time". This is one key way organisations can address unprecedented business problems such as the one posed by Disney South-east Asia.

If the dreams of designers could use a B-school reality check, the business world may increasingly need the human touch the creatives possess. Mr Gilby said: "In the past, people may have attributed these areas to softer skills, but these are core skills. The world is becoming increasingly complex, ambiguous, uncertain and volatile. Standing out requires really compelling stories."

And creating such compelling stories requires the successful integration of creative and business thinking.