Mikko Koria; a curious person who wears many hats: about design, interdisciplinarity and ways to reach joint meanings. Mikko Koria is; the Professor in Design Innovation and the Director of the Institute for Design Innovation at Loughborough University London, and Visiting Professor at Aalto University, Finland. He holds degrees in Architecture from University of San Paulo and Helsinki University of Technology, an MBA in Design Management from the University of Westminster and a PhD in Economics and Business Administration from the Helsinki School of Economics.

Over the last thirty years, Mikko has led complex, multicultural, and interdisciplinary initiatives and organisations, building teams and meaningful solutions in humanitarian work and business contexts, in many cases linking technical and social goals. 

Next to SMEs, start-ups, and multinationals, he worked with organizations such as the Red Cross, EU, UNICEF the World Bank in the UK, Finland, Brazil, and multiple other Asian, African, and South American countries. Key areas of research and professional practice include design driven education and training, value-intensive management, service design and innovation, policymaking, business models and ecosystems, entrepreneurship, and global management.

Today we are pleased to have Mikko Koria is with us and engage in a reflective chat about design, research, identity, interdisciplinarity and ethics. Mikko introduces himself as a person who has never quite figured it out and is constantly driven by curiosity to understand what is around the corner. 

From here on, we discuss design innovation and its inherent interdisciplinarity. How does a designer use the co-creation tools differently from an anthropologist? How to give voice to the people who do not understand their input? How to work around different agendas and achieve a joint meaning? At the end, Mikko reflects on the humane qualities that might bring a design practitioner closer to figuring out the unknowns.

Mentioned in Podcast: Institute for Design Innovation at Loughborough University London, https://www.lborolondon.ac.uk/institutes/design-innovation/

Social media: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikko-koria-44864a1/