Safe Environments for Innovation: the development of a new multidisciplinary masters programme

In September 2007, three schools at Northumbria University came together in collaboration to create a Masters Programme in Multidisciplinary Design Innovation (MDI). The lead school was the School of Design working together with the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences (CEIS) and the Newcastle Business School (NBS). This innovation was in response to an emerging understanding within the School of Design of the value of ‘Design-Thinking’ as a multi-disciplinary activity (developed and reinforced through a series of under-graduate pilot projects) and the Cox Review of Creativity in Business: building on the UK’s strengths, which was commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, at the time of the 2005 Budget (Cox, 2005). (Design-Thinking is an approach to viewing business and organisational situations from a more interpretative perspective than that of traditional business analysis (Lester et al,1998)) The programme was launched in September 2008.