The Business Design of the Tagged Tanakh

Q: What is business design?
A: An emerging field in economic and creative thinking.
Here’s one definition and here’s an entire blog dedicated to the subject. If you’re looking for a more academic perspective, check out what Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management has to say:

“Design’s powerful impact on business strategy will require a whole new way of thinking. Traditional companies reward two types of logic: inductive (proving that something actually operates) and deductive (proving that something must be). Designers combine inductive and deductive reasoning to create a fresh approach — abductive thinking — which I define as suggesting that something may be and reaching out to explore it. Instead of acting on what’s certain, designers bet on what’s probable. Companies such as Apple act like design shops by saying, ‘If everything must be proven, we’ll never make the likes of an iPod.’”

Still skeptical about design thinking kick starting the global economy? Here’s a conversation between BusinessWeek’s Innovation Guru, Bruce Nussbaum and the aforementioned Roger Martin.

One of the most influential American design houses of the last thirty years, Ideo has made business design their core service to organizations and nation states. Last year, their CEO Tim Brown, produced a Design Thinking Manifesto for the Harvard Business Review. If you want to get a masters in business design you can even go to Stanford’s d.school. But where are there examples of business design influencing the Jewish world?

Probably Shai Agassi’s Better Place is the most well known example. But where else can we see the ethos and practice of design thinking merge with Jewish values and education?

We hope that the Tagged Tanakh will be another shining example of Jewish business design. From our early thought experiments, to our user testing of the Tagged Tanakh prototype, we have been employing the design thinking process to imagine how people will interact with Torah and each other in the 21st century.

If you have a vision of what this looks like, please share it with us. Collaboration and the integration of multiple facets are central to the process of business design. In keeping with that philosophy, we hope that the Tagged Tanakh can become a platform that reveals even more than 70 faces of Torah.

Image taken from DesignThinking