How design helps to cultivate effective suspense

Abstract

This graduation project aimed at refining X!Delft’s value proposition and exploring the role of Design Thinking for their organisation. X!Delft is an organisation within the valorisation centre of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), responsible for setting up partnerships with industry in favour of knowledge and technology transfer. X!Delft intends to create an ‘innovation ecosystem’ in which TU Delft, companies, and startups work together on “new inventions” (van Wijnen, 2019). However, stimulating collaboration between multiple companies in such an ecosystem proves to be challenging. Hence, the ecosystem is now predominantly used for company-specific challenges. To encourage working as an ecosystem, it is essential to understand the partners’ needs upon entering a partnership with X!Delft. This enables the creation of a relevant value proposition, describing how X!Delft’s service offering adds value to its partners.A way to incorporate the needs of partners into a relevant value proposition is by means of Design Thinking (DT). DT is a human-centred innovation approach suitable for understanding and providing for people’s and companies (latent) needs (Hooge et al., 2012; Carlgren, 2013). To discover what incentivises companies to opt for a partnership with X!Delft, seventeen semi-structured interviews and three creative sessions were conducted. The research uncovers a shared driver across the industry partners of X!Delft, namely the sense of suspense. Suspense is defined as “a feeling or state of anxious or excited uncertainty about what may happen” (Oxford University Press , 2019). It complements literature’s description of ‘uncertainty’, by adding a factor of excitement and wonder, triggering an impulse to act. (Lehne & Koelsch, 2015). In order to understand how to manage suspense, the pragmatist inquiry proved to be useful (Lorino, 2018). In this inquiry, one moves from an uncertain situation towards a future ‘belief’, by combining experimentation and reasoning. Similarly, design practices are beneficial to coming up with future-focused solutions when considering situations of uncertainty or ambiguity.This resulted in the proposal of a new approach, PACES. The approach structures and expands X!Delft’s services so they “Preserve And Cultivate Effective Suspense”. This ‘effective suspense’, which incentivises engagement in a learning process, is cultivated in six phases: perceiving, perspective, predicting, paraphrasing, probing and proving. PACES stimulates collecting information continuously (perceiving) and sharing insights, increasing the collective knowledge base (perspective) to generate plausible predictions. These are then made actionable (paraphrasing) based on the strategic intent of individual actors, ensuring company-specific impact through the development of experiments (probing) followed by implementation projects (proving). A first ideation step is performed to translate PACES into services, complementing X!Delft’s current service offering. These services aim to incentivise participation in shared knowledge creation, hence enhancing collaboration in the innovation ecosystem. It is suggested to implement these shared services gradually - first stimulating collaboration in the first phases, and slowly moving to the last phases, where most of the knowledge creation takes place. In conclusion, some direction for future research and further development of PACES are given.