Beijing, China-On a seemingly ordinary Wednesday afternoon, the IMBA class of Renmin University School of Business was introduced to an extra ordinary guest speaker Dr. Humayun (Hugh) Rashid. Dr. Hugh is a practicing scholar with 25 years of experience working in the field of consulting with global organizations.

Dr. Hugh is not only a founder and managing partner of his own consulting company Xavor Corporation; he also regularly teaches lectures on subject of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at various universities including University of Southern California (USC), Wuhan University and Chongqing University.

On October 23rd, Dr. Hugh, on a scheduled guest lecture event organized by RBS taught an interesting lesson on the subject of “Managing as Designing: How to lead design-driven innovations”. ln the near fully packed classroom consisting of both Chinese and foreign students, Dr. Hugh spent the afternoon speaking about many subjects on the “Philosophy of Design” while debunking the confusion of innovation with invention and innovation.

The afternoon lecture explored a new way of to understand radical innovation that is shaping the world. He used examples of famous designers such as Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein as examples to demonstrate design practice and design methods that can be used by anyone to produce truly innovative and game changing services and products.

Dr. Hugh also introduced his topic by showing an interesting video on the company IDEO and their designing process of reinventing the conventional shopping cart. As an avid world traveler and boating enthusiast, Dr Hugh expressed his own experience with open environment designing process and the importance of ideas, no matter how big or small in a design process.

The receiver of doctorate from Case Western University and MBA from University of California at Irvine brought the room to a climax by introducing quote by the designer of modern China’s commerce, Deng Xiao Ping. Dr. Hugh used examples of tools such as storytelling, scrappy model building, intuition, systematic thinking, sketching and metaphors to show various ways of establishing design for an entrepreneur. It doesn’t matter what way you choose, so long as you get the job done, much like “Doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catch the mouse”.

The lecture came to an end after 2 hours, and as it was coming to an end, Dr Hugh introduced to the class 3 things everyone can do to become a more passionate person, including producing Happy Journal, developing vision board and answering questions regarding their own individual happiness.

You can contact Dr Hugh on related subject via email hrashid@xavor.com, and keep an lookout for his book on the subject focused on applying principles of innovation and entrepreneurship to provide novel approaches and solutions in extreme poverty situations. 

Writer&Editor: Clyde Rong

Photographer: Sean Ning