Design thinking comprises an approach to problem solving that uses tools traditionally utilized by designers of commercial products, processes, and environments (e.g., designing a new car or the ...layout of a new airport). While design thinking was originally introduced as an approach that would work best when infused into the culture of an organization, most early studies of design thinking focused on identifying the specific tools and methods that might be used to solve management problems. Only recently have researchers examined how the implementation of design thinking might relate to organizational-level constructs, such as organizational culture. In this review, we examine empirical research (mostly from the past decade) that relates the practice of design thinking to the development of culture in organizations. Through this review, we identify how the use of specific design thinking tools supports the development of specific organizational cultures and vice versa. In addition, we identify how using design thinking tools produces emotional experiences and physical artifacts that help users to understand why and how specific cultures support the effective use of specific tools. Together, our review findings suggest that the experiential nature of design thinking tools and cultures (i.e., that they require people to actively engage in hands-on work) allows them to support one another. On the basis of this insight, we develop a general framework for organizing design thinking research and identify a number of avenues for future research that might advance our understanding of design thinking in organizational contexts.
Drawing on the Letter to the Male “Good Apples” recently appeared in this section, my letter has a twofold aim: to provoke all the Male “Good Apples” in academia and to offer them an olive branch. As ...I provide them with a few practical suggestions, I hope to illuminate their way forward to truly “getting it”. It’s time to stop talking a good game and to start playing a better game.
Research on design and designers has emphasized the tacit nature of the aesthetic knowledge that these professionals draw upon to make decisions about formal properties of objects and spaces, but is ...less clear about how design teams address the difficulties associated with expressing and sharing this type of knowledge. A ten-month ethnography in a design consultancy revealed a range of multimodal and cross-modal ways in which members of a design team compensate their imperfect capacity of articulating verbally their aesthetic knowledge in order to enable creative collaboration. In so doing, our study offers two main contributions. It illuminates the interplay between designers’ aesthetic experiences, visceral responses and intuitive cognitive processes that enable designers to draw upon their aesthetic knowledge to support the collective accomplishment of their task, and provides an interpretation of the design process as a form of ‘creative’ intuition driven by emotional reactions to environmental stimuli and emerging formal solutions.
In this paper, we perform a review of relatively recent empirical research that relates new information technology to biased thinking. Based on this review, we develop a framework that suggests a ...number of implicit associations (i.e., unconscious linkages between phenomena, such as "women are nurturing") that relate new information technology to a variety of attitudes held by both organizational decision makers and average users of such information technology (e.g., "new information technology is superior to older information technology"). Our framework proposes a set of three underlying beliefs about new information technology (that new information technology is mysterious, nonhuman, and complex) that may underlie the implicit attitudes and biased thinking we identified. These underlying beliefs suggest that biases related to new information technology are distinct, in important ways, from most interpersonal biases studied in organizations. Given these findings, we suggest an agenda for future research that may enhance our ability to understand and mitigate biases related to new information technology in organizational settings.
Scholars and practitioners acknowledge the role of design, and specifically design thinking, as a driver of innovation and change. Design thinking is gaining attention in the business community ...beyond the traditional product innovation realm and is increasingly promoted as an engine for the creation of novel user experiences, new businesses, strategic transformation, organizational and cultural change. Is it reasonable to assume that the same set of practices fits such a broad range of applications equally well? This study addresses how design thinking applications are differently framed when addressing diverse innovation purposes. Specifically, we compare two purposes: innovation of solutions, encompassing traditional product and service development projects, and innovation of direction, encompassing strategic and organizational renewal projects. Based on data collected from 146 design thinking projects conducted by European consulting firms we investigate the relationships between the design thinking practices adopted and the value generated by the projects. We then analyze how these relationships vary depending on the purpose of the innovation project, namely whether focused on innovating solutions or direction. The results show that different purposes indeed call for different practices. In projects aimed at innovating solutions, market value is positively related to capturing current user needs and envisioning future society. Conversely, in projects aimed at innovating direction, market value is positively related to challenging current assumptions.
A growing body of research is drawing attention to the material practices that support verbal exchanges and cognitive processes in collective sensemaking. In this study, building on an ethnographic ...study of a design consulting firm, we develop a process model that accounts for the interplay between conversational and material practices in the transition from individual to group-level sensemaking, and we begin to unpack how the "materialization" of cognitive work supports the collective construction of new shared understandings.
Academia is a world filled with bright people searching for explanations for phenomena around us, and developing and testing new theories to explain the hows and whys of our experience. It is a world ...defined by a drive to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and is ostensibly characterized by intellectual enlightenment and relentless progress. But is academia truly progressive? Perhaps for some of us. For others, however, it is still a world where many people struggle to be seen, to be heard, and to succeed—especially if you are in the minority (e.g., you are female, international, a person of color, or have other features that put you in a minority category). In this essay, I share some of my personal experiences as an international female academic, with the hope that my challenges—and the ways I work to overcome them—will resonate with other people in the margins of our presumably progressive field.
Entrepreneurship and growth Wright, Mike; Stigliani, Ileana
International small business journal,
02/2013, Letnik:
31, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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The entrepreneurial growth literature is extensive, but research focusing on questions such as how firms grow, why they grow according to different patterns, how the decisions about growing or not ...growing are made, and the contextual dimensions within which growth takes place, has been neglected. This annual review article explores such issues: it suggests that there is a greater need to understand the processes that underlie entrepreneurial growth. In particular, we need to know more about how the entrepreneur’s cognitive processes shape growth (i.e. microfoundations of growth), how they access and configure resources to achieve growth (i.e. the resource orchestration underpinning growth), whether these are influenced by a wider variety of contextual dimensions than previously recognised, and how these influence different patterns and types of growth.
A growing body of research on how organizations engage with their histories has shown that organizational members revisit history in the light of present-day concerns to inspire or legitimize future ...courses of action. Studies of the processes through which organizational history is brought to bear on the present and future, however, remain rare. To uncover the processes and practices through which organizational members systematically engage with history, we investigate uses of material memory in four corporate museums. Our analysis uncovers three distinct modes of engagement, reflecting different temporal perspectives on organizational identity, involving different cross-temporal interpretative processes, and influencing action in different ways. Our theoretical insights have significant implications not only for understanding the use of history in organizations, but also for research on organizational identity and organizational memory.
This paper reviews research on product design in the broad domain of business studies. It highlights established and emerging perspectives and lines of inquiry, and organizes them around three core ...areas, corresponding to different stages of the design process (design activities, design choices, design results). Avenues for further research at the intersection of these bodies of research are identified and discussed, and the authors argue that management scholars possess conceptual and methodological tools suited to enriching research on design and effectively pursuing lines of investigation only partially addressed by other communities, such as the construction and deployment of design capabilities, or the organizational and institutional context of design activities.
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