Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek is an assistant managing editor in charge of the magazine’s innovation and design coverage. He’s just posted a speech he gave Tuesday at Innovation Night at the Royal College of Art in London.

I read the whole thing. I understood about half of it. The half I got I liked a lot. The half I didn’t get is no fault of Mr. Nussbaum. The problem rests with my inability to know if he is saying that in addition to the value of social networking in the making of great product designs, we can and should also bring great design to the social networking model. He’s saying design is a method of thinking. He’s saying, "CEOs must be designers and use their methodologies to actually run companies. Let me be even more precise. Design Thinking is the new Management Methodology.

I think Mr. Nussbaum may be asserting that great design must be applied not only to products in the traditional sense and by those at the highest levels of corporate management, but that the design of our social media initiatives must be enhanced as well? If that’s a correct reading, then I nominate Mr. Nussbaum for the Nobel Prize for Inspiration or whatever they give people who have great ideas. But I’m wary about this conclusion. Can great design concepts be applied to the spawning of a conversation and the building of a community? Seems to me the answer is yes, but I haven’t run into that many corporate people who talk and think that way. Therefore, if I’m misinterpreting this, well, never mind. It’s Saturday. It’s been a long week.

Whatever his exact meaning, here are two of my favorite paragraphs in the speech.

Innovation is no longer just about new technology per se. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about…

Design is so popular today mostly because business sees design as connecting it to the consumer populace in a deep, fundamental and honest way. An honest way. If you are in the myth-making business, you don’t need design. You need a great ad agency. But if you are in the authenticity and integrity business then you have to think design. If you are in the co-creation business today—and you’d better be in this age of social networking—then you have to think of design. Indeed, your brand is increasingly shaped and defined by network communities, not your ad agency. Brand manager? Forget about it. Brand curator maybe.

Currently, we do have a client who is the first and only person to have ever given any thought to the design of an online community she is building. She not only cares about the graphic design, but the navigability of the design and the proximity of online elements and the overall placement of things so that these things will be where most people expect to find them. I knew this was coming because she said at the outset, "I have a little background in design." But I expected it to result in great graphics, which it did, but also, if you think of a blog, for example, as a product, the one she’s making is fun to hold… know what I mean? Her ‘design’ contributions are producing a new online community site that exhibits a quality offering impossible to attain without this kind of thinking.

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It makes sense if you think about it. Colleges and universities are refreshed annually with a new crop of young people. Young people get it. They want it. So it doesn't surprise me to find more and more colleges and universities experimenting with social media and producing great results.

Here's a news report by Katie Wilson of the Times West Virginian in which she features the West Virginia University (WVU) College of Law. She reports:

On May 13, 25 students from the WVU College of Law departed for a study-abroad program in Brazil. The trip ended June 2. They catalogued their experiences in blogs, or Web logs, that were posted at on the university’s Web site…

Take a look at the site that was created, the posts that were written, the number of contributors enlisted in this effort and the overall quality of this University-sanctioned site. Amazing.

Now travel to the Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville (SIUE). Here's an Associated Press story from late May that reports about this university's creative application social media:

To mark the university's golden anniversary, administrators are asking alumni, students, faculty and community members to share their memories about SIUE through a blog.

This link takes you to that online site. In an email exchange yesterday with Ms. Barbara O'Malley, Executive Director of Marketing and Communications at SIUE, she told me, "The blog has been an interesting experiment." She didn't elaborate and I don't blame her for that, but I'm betting the emphasis is on the word interesting. I congratulate her and others like her because right now that's what social media is: a great and interesting experiment. College and university educators and staff like Ms. O'Malley that are willing to take the risks that attend any kind of experimentation should be lauded for their courage and creativity. Even when the results aren't what may be expected, everyone learns something and isn't that the idea?

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Here's an interesting bit of news out of Boulder, Colorado, yesterday. A search marketing and social media agency by the name of Room 214 won two awards from the Colorado chapter of the American Marketing Association. They got a Gold for their video tutorials and a silver for their white paper entitled "Fire Your PR Firm."

I see why they won. The white paper is brilliant. While it isn't anti public relations, per se, it plainly says what I've been saying for a long time, only better. For example:

This more-often-than-not hard working dedicated profession has a huge skill, talent and trust deficiency in the technical, “geeky” areas of measurement, analytics and ROI to justify its existence. That’s a problem when the CMO comes calling for accountability.

If you do nothing else this year to gain a better insight into what you should be doing in social media, why, and where you might get some real help, read this white paper from Room 214.

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