The thesis addresses the organizational challenges of lacking the big pictures in an early-stage startup. First, the author joined a newborn software venture as a founding product manager and observed the dynamics in his daily practice. Then, through numerous interviews with team leaders and employees, the author analyzed the data and discovered several issues happening in this newborn company. Among the findings, the most significant one is that the leaders didn’t reach a consensus on the company’s long-term goal; and the employees didn’t have an aligned sense of the company’s mission and product vision. This phenomenon led to employees’ low productivity in new product development, constantly making incorrect trade-offs, and misaligning collaboration across different teams. The project presented a design toolkit consisting of a canvas and an instruction brochure to overcome the challenge. This design toolkit helped the leaders collaboratively develop a big shared picture by outlining the company’s mission and product vision. The author held a design workshop to implement the solution with three company co-founders and successfully generate the organization’s long-term goal. As a result, the author evaluated the outcome by comparing employees’ behavioral changes. Internally, an enormous leap in the team’s productivity has been identified. Employees were able to accelerate the progress of the product development by eliminating irrelevant tasks. Additionally, the collective big pictures improved the collaborations between the product team and the business development team. Finally, they could make the right trade-offs according to the company’s big pictures. Externally, the CEO utilized the well-developed company mission and product vision to stand out from other candidates while applying startup accelerators. As a result, the company impressed the recruiter and successfully entered into a startup accelerator. Moreover, two corporations also invited the company to collaborate on building the product. In terms of customer acquisition, enhanced employee productivity helped the company get its first paid customer eight months after it was founded. These company achievements complement the outcome of the thesis by proving the importance of the company’s mission and product vision in an early-stage startup.

This report describes the development of the Ford Concreate, a data immersion toolkit designed for the Innovation Management for Smart Vehicle Concepts team (design team) of Ford’s Research and Innovation Centre Aachen. The collaborative data physicalisation toolkit consists of three elements: an instruction process, the physicalisation tool and a set of reflection cards. Together, these elements lead the target group to collect inspiring insights from quantitative data by stimulating reflection and creative thinking through physical interaction with data. By consciously engaging with data while creating a physical representation of a dataset, users better understand the data and reveal patterns that lead to new insights. The toolkit is designed for use during creative sessions, led by a session facilitator. With recent advances in data-based technologies like AI, machine learning and IoT, designing with data is becoming impossible to avoid. Within Ford, the amount of collected data is growing, forcing the design team to look for new ways to integrate its data to improve continuous product and service innovation. This led to the initial goal of ‘using data as creative material’, as quantitative data is currently solely being used for testing and validation rather than to inspire the entire design process. To specify and achieve this goal, the fields of creativity and data representation were identified and studied, focusing on answering the following research question: How can data be represented in a way that stimulated creativity during the design process at Ford? It was concluded that data physicalisation could stimulate creativity and lead to better insights as it encourages reflection and creates deepened understanding through active interaction with the data, which led to the development of the toolkit: the Ford Concreate.

Academically, the application of participatory practices that involve the people who will use the products or services has become widely recognized and essential. However, many organizations struggle with implementing this concept within their organizational context, particularly when it comes to participatory decision-making. It is common for decisions to be made by a few individuals with authority, significantly impacting others who feel limited in their ability to influence the outcome. Consequently, there is a pressing need to develop innovative solutions to address these challenges. This project, conducted in collaboration with CGI Netherlands GTO, aims to bridge the gap between the theoretical emphasis on participatory value and its practical application in organizations. Two research questions are formulated to guide the investigation: “How can participatory decision-making be integrated into GTO?” and “How can hierarchical structures and power imbalances in decision-making be overcome to embrace participatory decision-making?” To address these questions, a proposed reflexivity exercise, known as Power-full Reflexivity, is introduced. The goal of this exercise is to assist individuals in positions of authority in recognizing the power dynamics inherent in the decision-making process. The ultimate objective is to facilitate the meaningful involvement of individuals who are affected by the decisions and have experienced the issues, granting them greater access and agency within the decision-making process. It is believed that the use of Power-full Reflexivity by decision-makers will enhance the participatory value in their decision-making practices, benefiting individuals through increased agency and fostering a collaborative and participatory environment within the organization.