Scholars dedicated increasing attention towards appreciating how design has changed individuals׳ perception of new products, firms׳ understanding and formulation of strategy, or other relevant ...actors׳ approach to innovation and technology management. By emphasising the importance of design for the definition of consumers׳ needs, the restructuring of firms׳ organisational structures and strategies, and the evolution of firms׳ value creation processes, this review paper identifies relevant research gaps and questions that would benefit from future scholarly attention. In particular, it is suggested that such effort should address the analysis of how design consumption can help better comprehend consumers׳ needs; what are the implications of design thinking on the skill sets of design professionals; the organisational structure of firms, including the reconfiguration of other business functions, and their strategy; and whether and how design thinking can shape firms׳ value creation processes and contribute to the formalisation of design tasks.
•Conceptual review paper about the role of design in management science.•Discusses how a focus on design can help better comprehend consumers׳ needs.•Explores how design can shape the configuration of other business functions.•Explores how design can affect firms׳ value creation processes.•Identifies gaps and questions for future research in the innovation literature.
Capturing value from design-based innovation presents firms with some challenges which only recently academic research has started addressing. Increasingly, firms operating within design-intensive ...industries collaborate with external designers rather than undertaking this activity in-house. This raises some appropriability issues, as firms would need to reap the benefits of innovation originating across organisational boundaries. To address this gap, we carried out a multiple case study with firms and design consultants based in Italy across several manufacturing sectors. Our evidence suggests the presence of appropriability mechanisms that are specific to design innovation. Intellectual property rights, although not very effective, are employed to establish ownership in the market. Firms also use lead-time advantages, investment in specific assets and the quality of craftsmanship depending on the industry. Across most sectors, establishing long-term relationships inspired by knowledge sharing and trust constitutes a key mechanism firms adopt to appropriate the benefits attached to collaboration with external designers.
•Examines how members of a cluster manage the tension between stability and renewal.•An enactment lens shows how members construct their own meaning of cluster renewal.•A perceived change in members’ ...position in the cluster affects their response options.•Cluster inertia is due to a combined effect of a paradox of identity and embeddedness.•Renewal leads to a leadership vacuum when the initiator is not part of the cluster.
Clusters face what has been referred to as a ‘cluster paradox’; a situation in which a collective identity breeds cohesion and efficiency in inter-organisational collaboration, yet it hinders the variety needed to adapt to disruptive change and prevent lock-in situations. Accordingly, a recurring theme in the literature on cluster evolution and cluster life-cycles is the need for constant renewal to allow clusters to adapt to a changing environment. However, how individual firms enact a process of cluster renewal and consider possible response options is not well understood. Using a French energy cluster as empirical setting, this paper investigates individual members’ enactment of the renewal in terms of how it could affect their current position, both structurally and relationally, and to what extent members felt that they had agency to steer the process to safeguard their position. The findings show that members’ enactment of the proposed change does not only depend on the perceived impact of cluster renewal on the member itself but also on the impact the renewal might have on other members in the firm’s network. The analysis also suggests that cluster renewal leads to a leadership vacuum where it is not clear who, if anyone, will lead the renewal process.
Professions are not only primary targets of institutional change, but also key contributors to innovation processes. By focusing on how the knowledge needed in support of innovation is ...professionalised and reaches accepted modes of organising work, the paper examines the interplay between the emergence of a new professional domain and the institutional dynamics of the industry(ies) within which professionals operate. To this aim, we propose a reflection on the mechanisms that underpin the professionalisation of design activities in food industries. Empirical evidence draws attention to those practices that allow knowledge originated in different contexts to be socialised and converge towards the same institutional umbrella, that is, a new professional domain. The degree to which such professionalisation resonates with extant professions literature is discussed.
Research has debated to what extent policy measures can facilitate or contribute to the development of clusters. This article contributes to this debate by questioning how the government can create a ...cluster that is self-organizing and vibrant but also maintain sufficient influence to continue using the cluster as a policy instrument. Taking the perspective of cluster members, the article investigates how members perceive the ambiguous role of the government in a government-supported cluster. It analyses to what extent cluster members value a government-supported cluster and whether they perceive the government as one that facilitates or hinders them in self-organizing the cluster. Empirical evidence is derived from a case study of a French cluster established as a result of a cluster policy initiative and which has recently been required to fulfil a new set of objectives by the same government. The findings suggest that government-supported clusters can self-organize if members are given the opportunity, but with the consequence that it becomes difficult for the government to fully control such clusters. To continue steering the cluster's development, the government would have to leverage the technology gatekeepers' power by designing policies that allow gatekeepers to translate government objectives into meaningful objectives for themselves.
•Focus on the conversion and formalisation of novel practices within existing firm and industry.•Analyses knowledge systematisation and reconfiguration involved in design routines.•Development of a ...firm's business function stemming from diverse sets of knowledge.•Understanding of the interplay across individual skills, routines, and changing firm and industry organisation.•Institutional dimension incorporated to analysis of firm-level technological change.
The paper explores two pathways that are crucial for making knowledge economically useful – knowledge systematisation and knowledge reconfiguration – and analyses how their interplay enables the emergence of a new business function or activity. Knowledge systematisation is the abstraction and diffusion of operative principles to the effect of expanding to broader remits practices that had been initially conceived for a narrow purpose. Knowledge reconfiguration involves the conversion and formalisation of these novel practices within existing firm and industry organisation. Using the design activity as a lens, and drawing on primary and secondary interviews and archival data on the home furnishing sectors in Italy, our case study articulates the processes that facilitate the abstraction of general rules from novel practices and the changes that are necessary, both within firm and industry organisation, to foster their diffusion.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how incumbents adapt their business models in response to digital innovation whose impact is either incremental or radical and source industry is ...either their own industry or other industries. The authors propose a conceptual matrix that is built on these two dimensions.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors build examples of four multinational incumbents operating in different sectors and known for their forefront approach to digital innovation to populate the matrix. Cases were chosen because of their polar nature that could provide variation in the two dimensions. The authors draw on a variety of qualitative secondary data sources to build the cases.
Findings
The study reveals how incumbents’ response to digital technologies (DTs) may differ depending on the resources or assets (including knowledge-based ones) that need mobilising. Business model changes and innovations may require full reconfiguration of a firm’s activity system; hence, one business model may be preferred to others depending on how burdensome the reconfiguration process will be.
Research limitations/implications
As the study is exploratory in nature, the anecdotal evidence provided in the paper are only some of the possible strategic responses of firms. Future studies may further into the dimensions the authors identified by empirically testing their validity with primary data.
Practical implications
The research offers managers and executives of incumbent firms a clear indication as to which elements of their business model ought to be adapted given the opportunities as well as the challenges brought about by DTs.
Originality/value
This research has explored incumbents’ response to DTs by primarily focusing on the nature and source industry of the underpinning innovation, besides any consideration of the drivers or processes that may lead to business model change.
This paper explores persistence and learning effects in the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of design innovation. By combining insights from innovation economics and design studies, we discuss ...design innovation as the result of firm-specific cumulative learning. We then conceptualise design and product innovation as complementary processes whose interplay may lead to learning effects across different dimensions of knowledge creation. We provide quantitative evidence for these insights applying dynamic probit and bivariate probit models to a longitudinal dataset of manufacturing firms based in Spain for the period 2007–2016. Our findings confirm the presence of persistence effects in design innovation, offering novel evidence in support of the view whereby design is an iterative process shaped by the knowledge generated through firms’ previous engagement with design. In addition, the results contribute to our understanding of the role of design beyond its functional dimension, pointing to mutually reinforcing effects between aesthetic and symbolic design and product innovation.
This historical case study of the multinational agribusiness Monsanto explores the challenges organizations face when attempting to translate a problematic past into strategic gain. We draw on ...Resource-Based Theory (RBT) to explain how the relative ability to own and control history as an intangible resource enables or constrains effective managerial deployments of history. Our analysis explores three modes of using the past strategically: learning from the past, selectively interpreting the past, and disowning the past - the latter of which we demonstrate is distinct from existing conceptualizations of 'forgetting', 'rubbishing', or 'distancing' the past. Our analysis builds on RBT to explain why some modes of deploying history are more effective than others at enabling a strategic use of the past. The ambiguous nature of owning and controlling history, we contend, conditions the extent to which each mode of deploying history can or cannot produce strategic gains.
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