Leadership to Elevate Design at Scale: balancing conflicting imperatives

Little is known about how design leaders foster design excellence “at scale” within large organizations. To bridge this gap, this article reports on interviews with 59 senior design leaders. Using a paradox perspective to frame the findings uncovers major challenges when leading design teams inside large organizations. It also identifies five...

The Interplay between Intuition and Rationality in Strategic Decision Making: A Paradox Perspective

Both intuition and rationality can play important roles in strategic decision making. However, a framework that specifically accounts for the interplay between intuition and rationality is still missing. This study addresses this gap by using a paradox lens and conceptualizes the intuition–rationality duality as a paradoxical tension. We draw on...

Co-creating the future: Design practices and tools for effective customer co-creation

In this paper, we integrate literature on service-dominant logic (SDL) and innovation to examine the role of designers and their practices for collaborative resource innovation. More specifically, in taking a co-creation perspective we uncover a portfolio of practices that facilitate resource integration and innovation among companies and...

Extending design leadership to innovation strategy: Roles and tools

Collaborating with Design Consultancy firms for Effective Strategic Decision-Making in New Product Development

To contain risks and increase the profitability of innovation efforts, firms frequently engage in joint innovation activities with external sources of knowledge, like design consultancies. Innovation literature has given limited consideration to the strategic role that design consultancies can play in the innovation efforts of their clients. A...

Mental model differences between external designers and their clients: The influence on project exploration, project exploitation and project performance

Prior research indicated that external designers are often hired by their clients to bring new knowledge into their organization. To assure that an external designer’s knowledge is implemented in the organization of the client, managing the relationship between the two is essential. Although it seems particularly important that the external...

Balancing intuition and rationality for improving innovation decision-making: The role of design consultancies

To contain risks and increase the profitability of innovation efforts, firms frequently engage in joint innovation activities with external sources of knowledge, like design consultancies. Innovation literature has given limited consideration to the strategic role that design consultancies can play in the innovation efforts of their clients. A...

What is your experience? A study on collaborating NPD professionals and the effects of their dissimilar experiences on NPD outcomes

Prior research suggests that combining exploration and exploitation can ensure firms’ long term performance. However, balancing the two is challenging because of their fundamentally different nature. Collaboration with other companies can be a means to successfully combine exploration and exploitation. Studies on collaboration and its effects on...

The Role of Design Consultants in Innovation Strategy Decisionmaking

To contain risks and increase the profitability of innovation efforts, firms frequently engage in joint innovation activities with external sources of knowledge, like design consultancies. Innovation literature has given limited consideration to the strategic role that design consultancies can play in the innovation efforts of their clients. A...

The influence of mental model differences between external designers and their clients on new product development outcomes

Prior research indicated that external designers are often hired by their clients to bring new knowledge into their organization. To assure that an external designer’s knowledge is implemented in the organization of the client, managing the relationship between the two is essential. It seems to be particularly important that the external...

Improving innovation strategic decision-making through the collaboration with design consultancies

Innovation and design literature have given limited consideration to the strategic role of design consultancies in the innovation processes of their clients. A plausible explanation is the difficulty to assess the quality of design consultancies’ output, given the intangibility of the output itself and the difficulty of connecting a knowledge...

The experience of product service systems

In this paper, we focus on how to design product service systems (PSS) that provide for coherent user experiences. Our research is part of a large Dutch research program (CRISP, www.crispplatform.nl) on PSS. We propose a framework for identifying real PSS by integrating perspectives from economics and design theory. Our framework suggests that...

Ambidexterity in dyadic NPD relationships

An agenda for research on the relationships between industrial design and performance

This article proposes a research agenda for studying the relationships between industrial design and performance in the context of new product/service development. A review of existing research on relationships between industrial design and performance is used as a basis for identifying research opportunities and developing a research agenda....