SAP founder gives $35 million for Stanford D-School

Corporations on the hunt for more innovative, creative managers and employees should check this out--Hasso Plattner, co-founder of the business process software giant SAP, is donating $35 million to fund a new design school at Stanford. It will be housed in the Stanford School of Engineering and be called--what else?--the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. This is a big step in the evolution of design from form and style toward thinking and strategy. Plattner deserves tremendous credit.

David Kelley, Stanford engineering professor and co-founder of IDEO,is one of a small number of design academics who are working on new courses, case studies and other curriculae that take design's methodologies and people-focus to a higher level, making it much more valuable to industry and society as a whole. Roger Martin, dean at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto and Patrick Whitney, head of the Illinois Institute of Design, are part of that conservation.