Exploring the Fourth Order: Designing Organisational Infrastructure. In Research Perspectives in the Era of Transformations

Companies are organised to fulfil two distinctive functions: efficient and resilient exploitation of current business and parallel exploration of new possibilities. For the latter,<br/>companies require strong organisational infrastructure such as team compositions and functional structures to ensure exploration remains effective. This paper...

Overcoming the Valley of Death: A Design Innovation Perspective

In large organisations, innovation activities are often located in separate departments, centres or studios. These departments aim to produce prototypes of solutions to the problems of operational business owners. However, too often these concepts remain in the prototype stage: they never cross the valley of death to become implemented.<br/>A...

Design requirements to educate and facilitate junior design professionals to reflect more effectively on critical situations and conflicts at work

Junior designers are not trained to cope with critical situations and conflict at work. Most design schools do not educate their design students to prepare them for (potential) conflict. As a result, junior designers often do not have conflict-handling skills to handle critical situations and conflicts. While some tools and methods exist to...

Advancing Industry through Design: A Longitudinal Case Study of the Aviation Industry

Design educators and industry partners are critical knowledge managers and co-drivers of change, and design graduate and post-graduate students can act as catalysts for new ideas, energy, and perspectives. In this article, we will explore how design advances industry development through the lens of a longitudinal inquiry into activities...

Overcoming the Valley of Death: A Design Innovation Perspective

In large organisations, innovation activities are often located in separate departments, centres or studios. These departments aim to produce prototypes of solutions to the problems of operational business owners. However, too often these concepts remain in the prototype stage: they never cross the valley of death to become implemented.<br/>A...

Using Dynamic Capabilities in an actionable tool as a vehicle to initiate design-driven innovation

In order to become more innovative, corporations are increasingly turning to design-driven innovation capabilities. These capabilities are dynamic: they influence the way companies run their business and how companies create, capture and deliver value. Building design capabilities has proven difficult, given the tacit nature of design practice...

Customer Experience Strategy Turned into Hands‐On Actions Through a Design Approach

Customer experience (CX) is a differentiation strategy often chosen by companies. But several aspects can hinder the realization of this strategic change: Existing routines, strong silo thinking among departments, and other circumstances work against the creation of a holistic CX. There is very little guidance in the literature about becoming...

Introduction: Building New Capabilities in an Organization

There is an increasing need for organizations to adapt to rapid changes in society. This need requires organizations’ and the leader within them, to explore, recognize, build and exploit new capabilities. Researching such capabilities has drawn attention from the design management research community in recent years. Dominantly, research...

The role of service design practices in enabling and embedding the servitization transition

An increasing number of companies are embracing the transition from a product focus to a service focus in their offering in order to face the challenges of the experience economy. However such transition (i.e., servitization) is challenging, since it requires companies to change both their processes and their mindset. In this paper we propose...

Entrepreneurial universities meet their private partners: Towards a better embedding of the outcomes of cross-sector collaborations

In the past decades, universities’ involvement in socio-economic development, which goes along with their teaching and researching activities, has defined a new role for them in society’s ecosystem. This new role is often referred with the term of “entrepreneurial” university, whose objectives are positive societal, economic and environmental...

Building Design-led Ambidexterity in Big Companies

Organisational ambidexterity is considered a crucial capability for long term firm survival and development. However, adopting and successfully implementing it presents multiple challenges. Furthermore, despite being increasingly popular in the last two decades, the role design can play in achieving it is notably missing from the discussion....

Making it real: Successful service innovation through integrated service implementation

Supporting NPD teams in innovation: Structuring user data on the foundations of empathy

Gathering and analyzing user data in new product development (NPD), both qualitative and quantitative, can be a strong driver for innovation in companies. While ideally user data should be obtained through direct interactions between NPD departments and targeted users, time and cost restrictions often make this impossible within organisations....