Two decades of visionary thinking

5/9/2012 - The MMM program celebrated 20 years of visionary education April 27 at the Evanston Golf Club.

More than 180 alumni and friends of the program attended the celebration, which included remarks from Kellogg School of Management Dean Sally Blount and McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Julio M. Ottino.

The celebration featured a keynote address from Bruce Mau, founder of Bruce Mau Design and a distinguished fellow at McCormick's Segal Design Institute.

"MMM alumni have gone on to successful careers in many different fields, and it was exciting to host an event for our alumni to come back and share their stories,” said Greg Holderfield, director of the Segal Design Institute and director of the MMM program with Bobby Calder, the Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing at Kellogg. “Our alumni and current students are passionate about integrating management, marketing, operations and design thinking into developing new products and services, and it's important for us to celebrate that."

MMM is a dual-degree program integrating the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering that educates visionary leaders to innovate customer experiences from system design through fulfillment. When it was created 20 years ago, the three Ms stood for "Master of Management and Manufacturing." It evolved to include process and product innovation, supply chain and operation management.

Today the program teaches interdisciplinary innovation through a curriculum based on “process + possibility-based thinking.” Process-based thinking is rigorous, logical, and factual; possibility-based thinking is human-centered, re-framed, and exploratory. The understanding of both enables students to create new and truly meaningful knowledge that leads to actionable innovation in the marketplace, improving organizations and communities around the world.

"The MMM program has been a successful 20-year partnership between McCormick and Kellogg, and we continually look to innovate our curriculum to teach the next generation of visionary leaders," Holderfield said.