Companies are organised to fulfil two distinctive functions: efficient and resilient exploitation of current business and parallel exploration of new possibilities. For the latter,
companies require strong organisational infrastructure such as team compositions and functional structures to ensure exploration remains effective. This paper explores the
potential for designing organisational infrastructure to be part of fourth order subject matter. In particular, it explores how organisational infrastructure could be designed in the
context of an exploratory unit, operating in a large heritage airline. This paper leverages insights from a long-term action research project and finds that building trust and shared
frames are crucial to designing infrastructure that affords the greater explorative agenda of an organisation.

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.
A design approach to innovation is presented as a solution to the problem. However, practice shows that teams that use this approach nevertheless encounter this problem due to the larger infrastructure of the organisation they are part of. This research aims to explore which factors contribute to the valley of death for design innovation. Additionally, this paper presents first insights into how design practices help to mitigate this phenomenon.
An embedded multiple case study at a large heritage airline is used to study this phenomenon. A thematic analysis of the data finds that organisational design, departmental silo’s and dissimilar innovation strategies contribute to the valley of death. The issues with resource-assignment that result from these factors are displayed. Last, materialization, user-centeredness and holistic problem-framing are indicated as practices that help to mitigate this problem.

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 help them make responsible design choices, these often address value differences underlying (potential) conflict without taking the perspective of the designer, and thus without supporting young designers to start by reflecting on their own intrinsic values. The aim of this study is to find a way to help junior designers to reflect effectively on critical situations, thereby improving their conflict-handling skills. Data was collected through four steps in an action research. Researchers collaborated with an identity programme for junior design professionals. Insights from try-outs and small interventions were transferred into design requirements for an approach to educate and facilitate junior design professionals to reflect more effectively on critical situations.

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 carried out as part of a Dutch design faculty-industry collaboration. We analyze seventy-five (75) Master of Science (MSc) thesis outcomes and seven (7) Doctorate (PhD) thesis outcomes (five in progress) to identify ways that design activities have influenced advances in the Dutch aviation industry over time. Based on these findings, we then introduce an Industry Design Framework, which organizes the industry/design relationship as a three-layered system. This novel approach to engaging industry in design research and design education has immediate practical value and theoretical significance, both in the present and for future research.

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.
A design approach to innovation is presented as a solution to the problem. However, practice shows that teams that use this approach nevertheless encounter this problem due to the larger infrastructure of the organisation they are part of. This research aims to explore which factors contribute to the valley of death for design innovation. Additionally, this paper presents first insights into how design practices help to mitigate this phenomenon.
An embedded multiple case study at a large heritage airline is used to study this phenomenon. A thematic analysis of the data finds that organisational design, departmental silo’s and dissimilar innovation strategies contribute to the valley of death. The issues with resource-assignment that result from these factors are displayed. Last, materialization, user-centeredness and holistic problem-framing are indicated as practices that help to mitigate this problem.

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 and the conflicting reasoning style of abduction that allows for the creative leap. However, if these enterprises don’t improve, they are in danger of losing their
ability to add value to the market. This may result in loss of market-share, which may lead to job destruction and the loss of valuable knowledge as communities of practice fall apart. This paper describes an iterative design process in which a tool was developed to determine which design-driven innovation capabilities a company is lacking. The tool started as a theoretical framework and was subsequently developed by prototyping with innovation managers from several large corporates. This paper contributes a ne
w ‘dynamic capabilities view’ on design and innovation and a practical approach to implementing design in large firms.

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 contributions have focused on perspectives of innovation and the strategic application of design with the researcher distanced from context. Descriptive and evaluative case studies of past organizational leadership have been vital, by building momentum for the design movement. However, there is a need now to progress toward prescriptive and explorative research perspectives that embrace context through practice and the simultaneous research of design. Therefore, the aim of this track is to lead and progress discussion on research methodologies that support the research community in developing explorative and prescriptive research methodologies for context-orientated organizational research. This track brings together a group of diverse international researchers and practitioners to fuel discussion on design approaches and subsequent outcomes of prescriptive and explorative research methodologies.

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 impacts. In order to fulfil such objectives, entrepreneurial universities might engage in cross-sector collaborations with external organisations. Despite the great contributions that cross-sector collaboration can give to the partners involved, the outcome is mostly unfocussed and rarely embedded. This paper explores the outcome
embedding in the cross-sector collaboration between entrepreneurial universities and the private sector. To this end, we provide the case of the collaboration between a Dutch airline company and four Dutch entrepreneurial research and teaching institutions. We aim to uncover hindering and
enabling factors to the outcome embedding in order to design an interaction platform, design it together. This platform will be a tool to encourage the outcome embedding, moving from being inspired by to the actual implementation of the cross-sector collaboration. In order to fulfil this goal,
this study employs a research through design methodology. This approach is a generative process, where cyclic loops of iterations and evaluations with stakeholders tend to the research goal. The solution is a digital platform, co-created with all stakeholders. This study can inspire practitioners and future research on the problem of unsuccessful cross-sector collaborations, between
entrepreneurial universities and external organisations, with more emphasis on the value of embedding and translating the outcomes.

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. This paper analyses the attempts to accelerate the innovation pace of two large international companies in the consumer electronics and healthcare and airline industries. Both attempt to combine design and agile elements in fast-paced environments, while working in multidisciplinary teams early in the NPD process. However, one is guided by designers, the other by people with a background in operational functions. As such, they provide a good foundation to study design’s role and its implications in achieving ambidexterity in two large international companies. The collected insights helped us to define a new form of ambidexterity and devise a model for building ambidextrous organisations through design.

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 service design practices as an effective approach for overcoming the challenges of servitization and for achieving such a multi-layered transformation. By means of expert interviews, ethnography and multiple case studies, we empirically show how service design professionals guide companies towards a sustainable adoption of service orientation and successful implementation of service innovations. Specifically, we describe and exemplify a set of practices through which service design professionals establish a service-oriented mindset, introduce a service-specific development process, and a create widespread commitment to the servitization transition.

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 more customer centric in practice. Within design practice, customer‐centric thinking and working are key aspects. Therefore, this article addresses the question of how a design approach can facilitate a company's change process from the abstract strategic direction of focusing on CX to a way of working in practice. The article is based on a practice‐led case study of an airline company where the first author worked from within the company to test solutions directly in daily practice. We conclude that in order to move from the strategic direction of a CX focus to an applicable proposal, designers can support both top‐down and bottom‐up processes. A trial‐and‐error approach and boundary objects can be useful in finding emotional triggers for employees to reflect about their own roles

In order to remain competitive in the aviation industry, airlines and other companies are turning towards passenger experience for differentiation.
This paper addresses how an established airline considers the passenger
within their design projects and the management of these processes.
Through multiple interviews of key managers within the company a broad
view is provided of their perspective dealing with the passenger-­‐focused
change in the company. Other topics that are discussed are: dealing with
the restrictions specific to the industry, challenges encountered that kept
the airline from innovating from a passenger perspective, balancing between
innovation and ongoing operations as well moving from a vision towards
implementation.

Purpose: One of the key challenges in the servitization of companies is developing the required capabilities to deliver advanced services. A strategy to tackle this challenge is to collaborate with a service-providing partner, that has complimentary capabilities. In such collaboration, though, the people involved have to serve their corporate goals and have different organisational and professional backgrounds. The differences challenge the collaboration. In practice, people struggle to deal with the critical situations that arise when these differences affect the collaboration. The literature’s recommendations on what to do in those situations show great variety and can even be contradictory. This paper presents a repertoire of actions people can take in the critical situations they experience when collaborating with a service-provider. Design/methodology/approach: Based on an earlier study into critical situations in the collaboration in those networks, we developed an experiment to study what people do in those situations. We asked thirty managers with experience in such collaborations what they would do in the fifteen situations we provided. Findings: Across the situations presented in the simulation experiment, recurring themes emerged in the activities people undertook and further analysis resulted in a repertoire of actions that servitizing collaborators can take to act upon the critical situations in servitization they experience while collaborating with service providers. Originality/Value: This paper provides practitioners in servitization collaboration with a hands-on action repertoire. This repertoire can be further developed into a general tool for collaboration in servitization to resolve collaborative issues as they arise.