Doing Design Thinking: Conceptual Review,Synthesis, and Research Agenda

Design thinking has attracted considerable interest from practitioners and academics alike, as it offers a novel approach to innovation and problem‐solving. However, there appear to be substantial differences between promoters and critics about its essential attributes, applicability, and outcomes. To shed light on current knowledge and conceptualizations of design thinking we undertook a multiphase study. First, a systematic review of the design thinking literature enabled us to identify 10 principal attributes and 8 tools and methods. To validate and refine our findings, we then employed a card sorting exercise with professional designers. Finally, we undertook a cluster analysis to reveal structural patterns within the design thinking literature. Our research makes three principal contributions to design and innovation management theory and practice. First, in rigorously deriving 10 attributes and 8 essential tools and methods that support them from a broad and multidisciplinary assortment of articles, we bring much needed clarity and validity to a construct plagued by polysemy and thus threatened by “construct collapse.” Second, aided by the identification of perspectives of scholars writing about design thinking, we provide detailed recommendations for relevant topics warranting further study in order to advance theoretical understanding of design thinking and test its applications. Third, we identify the enduring, yet essential, questions that remain unresolved across the extant design thinking literature and that may impede its practical implementation. We also provide suggestions for the theoretic frames, which may help address them, and thus advance the ability of scholars and managers alike to benefit from design thinking’s apparent advantages.     

Models with graphical representation for innovation management: a literature review

In the last decades, the management of innovation has achieved increasing importance in both academic and business environments. For the companies, an effective engagement in innovation efforts involves the adoption of management models to guide the definition of organizational processes to conduct innovation opportunities throughout the organization. In this context, graphical representations can strongly communicate the central propositions of each model, accelerating the diffusion and influence of such models in both academic and business environments. Based on an academic database search, and snowball procedure, models were selected considering the unique characteristics of their graphical representation. This article contributes to the knowledge in the field by proposing a typology of innovation management models, highlighting model's biases, gaps, strengths and weaknesses, and by identifying important tensions among models that spillover to the innovation management field in both research and practice. This article discusses conflicts regarding the limits of the innovation process (events that start and end the process and complementary approaches), the limits of focusing on processes, the differentiation of research and development and new product development activities. In the end, the article addresses emerging approaches related to radical innovation, design thinking and startups, and stresses contributions for research and practice.     

Passion for Work,Nonwork‐Related Excitement,and Innovation Managers’ Decision to Exploit New Product Opportunities

This article investigates the role of affect in innovation managers’ decision to exploit new product opportunities—a decision central to the innovation process. The model proposes that different types of passion can trigger managers’ exploitation decisions but that this effect is contingent on experiencing excitement from events outside their work environment. A field experiment with 90 owner–managers of young firms located in an innovation context (business incubators) shows that passion for work and nonwork‐related excitement levels interdependently impact innovation managers’ decision to exploit new product opportunities. Specifically, harmonious passion has a general positive effect on managers’ propensity to exploit. In contrast, the effect of obsessive passion is more complex and contingent on the additional excitement managers experience such that the positive relationship between obsessive passion and the decision to exploit is more positive with higher levels of excitement. These findings extend the product innovation management literature by acknowledging that decision‐makers’ affective experiences influence innovation decisions and provide a first step toward understanding the role of affect and passion in the product innovation context. Second, the finding that obsessive passion and nonwork‐related excitement interact in explaining opportunity exploitation decisions highlights the need to incorporate contingency relationships in models of innovation decision‐making. Third, in drawing on a field experiment and the experimental manipulation of managerial affect during the decision‐making task, this article answers a recent call in the project management literature to pursue less common methodological approaches and develop “broader theoretical schema” in order to enhance our understanding of innovation management. Finally, this study also has implications for practitioners because it can help innovation managers understand their own decision policies. To the extent that innovation managers are able to regulate their affective experiences, this improved understanding might prevent them from premature and faulty decision‐making.     

Managerial Political Behavior in Innovation Portfolio Management: A Sensegiving and Sensebreaking Process

By applying formalized innovation portfolio management systems, firms seek to ensure an alignment of their goals and strategy with their employees' different abilities, actions, and outcomes. However, research indicates that nonrational, political behavior also determines formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. Research on political behavior in respect of innovation portfolio management usually conceptualizes political behavior as a set of self‐serving activities, such as negotiation, bargaining, coalition building, and acquiring power, aimed at protecting, maintaining, or promoting an actor's self‐interest and power. Consequently, extant research tends to focus on political behavior's dysfunctional impacts on decision‐making processes and their subsequent outcomes. This paper challenges this negativity bias by exploring a novel, neutral specification of political behavior and its relation to innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. By conducting an automotive industry case study focusing on the innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes, the paper analyzed the data from 43 interviewees. The conceptual model shows that managers' political capabilities determine their ability to behave politically. According to the results, political behavior comprises the activities that prepare the stage and orchestrate others in order to form a political coalition. Furthermore, results show that political behavior functions as a sensegiving and a sensebreaking process, with managers seeking to shape an innovation project's understanding according to their interests and to influence portfolio decisions. The resulting novel specification of political behavior extends the construct's scope and validity by investigating their functional and dysfunctional aspects, and by indicating that a political sensemaking process complements formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes.     

Building a Measurement Model for Market Visioning Competence and Its Proposed Antecedents: Organizational Encouragement of Divergent Thinking,Divergent Thinking Attitudes,and Ideational Behavior

The overall question that this research seeks to answer is the following: Are there individual and/or organizational resources related to “divergent thinking” that enhance or inhibit the firm's market visioning competence in the case of radical innovation? In order to answer this question, in this paper, the key focus is on the realm of potential divergent thinking‐related resources that the firm may possess and access to aid in the creation and development of an effective market visioning competence. In particular, individual‐level factors related to divergent thinking capabilities and, at the organizational level, encouragement of such capabilities, are investigated. Specifically, we propose that two organizational‐level factors related to organizational encouragement of divergent thinking (“encouraging ideas” and “encouraging diversity”), two individual‐level divergent thinking attitudes factors (“openness” and “ability to move from divergent thinking to convergent thinking efficiently and effectively”), one individual‐level ideational behavior factor (“ability to generate new ideas”), and a further individual cognitive factor (“need for cognition”) have direct impacts on market visioning competence. Scales are then developed and tested for measuring these potential antecedents, and they are included in a measurement model with market visioning competence to enable further research.     

Legitimizing Academic Research in Design: Lessons from Research on New Product Development and Innovation

This article traces how academic research in the domain of new product development and innovation has become “legitimized” over the last several decades and makes three suggestions for how academics in the research domain of design can pursue a similar legitimization process. Specifically, academics researching design issues should: (1) partner with a professional design association; (2) develop a high‐quality peer‐reviewed journal focusing on design issues; and (3) organize an A‐level association design special‐interest group.     

Academic brands and their impact on scientific endeavour: The case of business market research and researchers

This paper examines the significance of the rapid development of so-called “academic brands” in Marketing for the process of academic research and for the work and the careers of researchers: It focuses on the specific case of business market research and researchers. The paper starts by exploring the ideas behind the development of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and its impact on the academic community: CCT appears as an emblematic case of branding of an academic community. The paper then discusses the rapid emergence of the Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) as a case of branding which has a direct impact on business market research. The paper then relates the emergence of these two “brands” to developments in business market research and more specifically to the development of IMP as a brand. Finally, the paper draws some conclusions about the role of academic branding and its impact on scientific endeavour with emphasis on the future of business marketing research and researchers.     

New Zealand secondary technology teachers’ perceptions: “technological” or “technical” thinking?

Technology education in the New Zealand context has seen significant change since it’s inception as a technical subject. The changing nature of the subject in New Zealand secondary schools is influenced by some teachers’ preoccupation with the making of quality product outcomes, rather than their enactment of the curriculum, which conceptualises a wider remit. Research into the perceptions of technology teachers’ interpretation and enactment of the curriculum suggests that to enable change, teachers need to adopt a form of “technological thinking”, in support of their “technical thinking”. Technological thinking is a notion presented to support teachers to explore a range of differing pedagogical approaches and learning outcomes, reflective of the intent of the New Zealand curriculum, which aims to foster learning environments that are innovative and responsive to students’ social and academic needs.     

Leveraging External Sources of Innovation: A Review of Research on Open Innovation

This paper reviews research on open innovation that considers how and why firms commercialize external sources of innovations. It examines both the “outside‐in” and “coupled” modes of open innovation. From an analysis of prior research on how firms leverage external sources of innovation, it suggests a four‐phase model in which a linear process—(1) obtaining, (2) integrating, and (3) commercializing external innovations—is combined with (4) interaction between the firm and its collaborators. This model is used to classify papers taken from the top 25 innovation journals, complemented by highly cited work beyond those journals. A review of 291 open innovation‐related publications from these sources shows that the majority of these articles indeed address elements of this inbound open innovation process model. Specifically, it finds that researchers have front‐loaded their examination of the leveraging process, with an emphasis on obtaining innovations from external sources. However, there is a relative dearth of research related to integrating and commercializing these innovations. Research on obtaining innovations includes searching, enabling, filtering, and acquiring—each category with its own specific set of mechanisms and conditions. Integrating innovations has been mostly studied from an absorptive capacity perspective, with less attention given to the impact of competencies and culture (including “not invented here”). Commercializing innovations puts the most emphasis on how external innovations create value rather than how firms capture value from those innovations. Finally, the interaction phase considers both feedback for the linear process and reciprocal innovation processes such as cocreation, network collaboration, and community innovation. This review and synthesis suggests several gaps in prior research. One is a tendency to ignore the importance of business models, despite their central role in distinguishing open innovation from earlier research on interorganizational collaboration in innovation. Another gap is a tendency in open innovation to use “innovation” in a way inconsistent with earlier definitions in innovation management. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research that include examining the end‐to‐end innovation commercialization process, and studying the moderators and limits of leveraging external sources of innovation.     

Corporate entrepreneurship initiatives: Antagonizing cognitive biases in business model design

Entrepreneurs designing novel business model configurations face cognitive biases that derive from limited mental capacity to deal with complex and uncertain decision contexts. Building on the notion of the business model as an idiosyncratic mental representation that organizes managerial understanding of value creating and value capture, we investigate how entrepreneurs cope with cognitive biases inherent in business model design. We conducted a total of 35 in‐depth interviews with entrepreneurs situated in 15 corporate entrepreneurship initiatives in Germany. Our study results suggest that entrepreneurs counter cognitive biases by combining intuitive and deliberate reasoning approaches. Specifically, we identify five cognitive mechanisms and two higher level cognitive processes undergirding entrepreneurial reasoning in the design of new business models. Our findings provide empirically grounded insights into the cognitive perspective in business model research and help to theorize managerial reasoning during the process of business model design.     

Design Is Everything?

This essay attempts to demarcate the industrial practice of product design and situate it in the context of academic research. The term product design presents definitional challenges, as it is used in practice in different ways, and even varies in usage regionally. For this article, product design is “conceiving and giving form to goods and services that address needs.” The activity of product design can be thought of as comprising several key decisions. Because the decisions of product design do not map cleanly to any one academic discipline, the subject has not garnered enough attention in any one field to develop fully its own academic identity. Scholarly research in product design has often been cultivated by the emergence of a methodological paradigm. While several such paradigms are in use, several others offer substantial promise.     

Antecedents to Decision‐Making Quality and Agility in Innovation Portfolio Management

Innovation portfolio management (IPM) is a dynamic decision‐making process, in which projects are evaluated and selected, and resources are allocated. Previous research has developed an understanding of IPM success and its influencing factors. However, little research investigated the quality of the decision‐making process and the ability to quickly adapt the portfolio. This study focuses on the antecedents of decision‐making quality and agility (i.e., responsiveness to changes in the environment). Based on a decision‐making framework, five structural and cultural IPM components are derived as important antecedents of decision‐making quality, which in turn influences agility. The structural components (1) clarity of strategic goals, (2) formality of the IPM processes, and (3) controlling intensity serve a coordinating function. The cultural components (4) innovation climate and (5) risk climate serve a motivating function in IPM. An analysis of a sample of 179 firms and their innovation portfolios through structural equation modeling using a double‐informant design documents that these five components all positively influence portfolio decision‐making quality, which in turn positively influences agility. Results further show that environmental turbulence moderates some of these relationships. While the positive effect of process formality is weakened under increasing turbulence, the effects of controlling intensity and climate for innovation are strengthened by environmental turbulence. The findings have theoretical implications for the understanding of IPM as a dynamic capability and practical implications for the management of portfolios in turbulent environments.     

Divergent thinking and market visioning competence: An early front-end radical innovation success typology

Achieving superior and longer-term rewards associated with the pursuit of radical innovation requires that firms have a market vision (MV), or a clear and specific image of a desired and important product-market for a new technology, and are able to attract human and investment capital (AAC) in order to carry out and finance these risky ventures. To achieve these outcomes, firms need to build a market visioning competence (MVC)—that is, an ability to link advanced technologies to market opportunities of the future. Developing an MVC entails the efforts of both the individuals who are part of the innovation process and the organization itself. Four components comprise the MVC equation: the individual-level capabilities of “networking” and “idea-driving,” and the organization-level capabilities of “market learning tools” and “proactive market orientation.” In this article, we focus on the conditions within the firm that need to be created and fostered to ensure an effective MVC. The antecedents of interest involve the capacity for divergent thinking—that is, the ability to go beyond the boundaries of established thought—and include four individual- and two organization-level constructs. Individual divergent thinking skills include (1) attitude of openness to new ideas; (2) ability to create, combine and help others to generate new ideas; (3) ability to move efficiently from divergent to convergent thinking; and (4) a passion for cognitive challenges. Two organization-level antecedents include: an innovation culture of (5) encouragement of idea freedom and (6) encouragement of diversity. Based on a survey of 198 high-tech firms in the North American nanotechnology sector, cluster analysis was used to develop a typology of scenarios that provides a holistic view of what distinguishes firms in terms of MVC, their ability to create and manage individual- and organization-level divergent thinking approaches, as well as the outcomes of MV and AAC. Three distinct profiles emerge. The “balanced MVC profile” rates high on all factors—components, antecedents and outcomes—and provides a “model” for managers concerned with developing an effective MVC. Cluster #2, labeled “need MVC system/culture,” while having the most important element in place—the individuals who think in dynamic ways and connect firms with totally new opportunities—require both market learning systems and a more proactive market orientation, and in particular, an organization culture where management encourages divergent thinking. Cluster #3 (“lack MVC basics”) firms have invested in MVC-related infrastructure, but this provides an anemic context when the key elements of individual innovativeness in terms of the ability to think in radically new ways and an organization culture that encourages this are lacking. Based on the MVC concepts, relationships discussed and the empirical evidence, this article offers insights for researchers in terms of theory and scale development, and for managers charged with radical innovation in terms of the actions needed to enhance MVC and, ultimately, NPD performance.     

B2B relationships on the fast track: An empirical investigation into the outcomes of solution provision

In academic and business literature, suppliers providing solutions to their business-to-business (B2B) customers are often described as achieving increased customer retention, higher sales volumes, and enhanced cross-selling. Yet there is limited empirical evidence to support the positive impact of solutions on these customer-related outcomes. Moreover, it is unclear whether suppliers obtain similar outcomes from buyers at different relationship life-cycle stages. This paper aims to address these two gaps and tests the contingency role of the relationship life-cycle in driving future customer outcomes. It proposes that there is a positive effect for solutions provided to recent customers (labeled as “accelerator” role) rather than to established ones (labeled as “leverage” role). Results from a longitudinal analysis of the sales database of a North American company providing solutions to its customers empirically support the “accelerator” role of solutions.     

The Transformation of the Innovation Process: How Digital Tools are Changing Work,Collaboration, and Organizations in New Product Development*

Over the past several decades, digitization has invaded all areas of human activity, including innovation. The result of digitization of existing tools for design and collaboration, and the introduction of entirely new digital tools, is a far more substantive change of innovation than previous generations of tools enabled. It affects not only the quality of the output and speed of its generation, but it affects the innovation work itself, changes work content, collaboration patterns, decision authority, organizational set‐ups, governance structures, firm boundaries, and ultimately entire ecosystems. In this paper, the digitization of New Product Development (NPD), a subset of innovation, is studied to pursue two research questions: (1) How has the digital tool landscape in NPD changed over the past 15 years, and (2) how have these changes affected how firms innovate? This research uses a longitudinal multi‐method, qualitative approach to deep dive into actual use cases of digital design tools such as computer‐aided design CAD and new tools such as collaborative information technology (CIT). The changes in these tools and observations into how these tools are transforming the very nature of how things are designed is the research focus of this study. These tools have become increasingly more sophisticated while being easier to use and are integrated earlier in the design process. As a result, digital tools have a far broader reaching impact than previous generation of tools. Not only do they affect output and process efficiency, but they also increase depth and breadth of the work of individual innovators, they lead to rearrangement of the entire innovation processes, enable new configurations of people, teams, and firms, and rewrite the rules on how knowledge management acts as a critical competitive capability. The progression of digitization is laying the groundwork for changes to what firms are and do and points to different ways of organizing, specializing, and training for NPD professionals.     

Business model innovation and decision making: uncovering mechanisms for coping with uncertainty

As a research subject, business model innovation spans the strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship fields. Yet, despite the importance of the concept, prior work has paid little attention to how decision-makers cope with uncertainty and gain understanding about interdependencies in new business model configurations. To address this gap, we combine top-down theorising and evidence-based exploration and seek to unpack some of the coping mechanisms that operate in the evolutionary view of business model innovation. Using in-depth interviewing to collect data, our study reveals five strategies – customer centricity, value co-creation, capability evolution, ecosystem growth, and adaptive pricing – that decision-makers apply to cope with uncertainty in business model innovation. We find that coping mechanisms support decision making during the development of new business models. Furthermore, we find that the five coping strategies delineate decision making for value proposition, value creation, and value capture configurations in more detail than existing literature has described. Our findings have important implications for decision making in business model innovation.     

Time and Space in Strategy Discourse: Implications for Intertemporal Choice

Research summary : When describing the future, executives draw analogies between time and space (“we are on the right path,” “the deadline is approaching”). These analogies shape how executives construe the future and influence attitudes to action with long‐term benefits but short‐term costs. Ego‐moving frames (“we are approaching the future”) prompt a focus on the present, whereas time‐moving frames (“the future is approaching”) underscore the advent of the future as inevitable. Ultimately, action that prioritizes long‐term returns depends both on how executives conceive of the future and whether they believe they can engender favorable outcomes. This balance between recognizing the inevitability of the future (time‐moving frame) and the capacity to shape outcomes (control beliefs) stands in contrast to the more agentic forms of discourse that are dominant in strategy . Managerial summary : Executives often prioritize maximizing immediate returns over investing to build a long‐term competitive advantage. How they think about the future offers one explanation for this short‐termism. This article distinguishes two ways of framing the future with implications for decision‐making. Are we approaching the future (the ego‐moving frame) or is it approaching us (the time‐moving frame)? As long as executives have confidence in their ability to achieve forecasted results, they focus on long‐term returns in their decision‐making when they recognize the advent of the future as inevitable (the time‐moving frame). In contrast, though executives use the ego‐moving frame to show that they are active agents, they weigh future returns less heavily when framing the future in this way . Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On Elevating Strategic Design Research*

While the popular understanding of the influence of design is growing, academic research has largely been restricted to considering consumer‐level responses to design elements. This paper reviews this past work and proposes a more strategic research agenda for the field, with the potential to explicate linkages between design elements and strategies and outcomes related to innovation and corporate performance.     

When Will Employees Embrace Managers' Technological Innovations? The Mediating Effects of Employees' Perceptions of Fairness on Their Willingness to Accept Change and its Legitimacy

Innovation researchers have thoroughly discussed how attitudes toward innovation influence people's intentions to use it. Most prior research tried to explore employees' acceptance of technological change through the lens of change initiators; however, using a manager's or the “great man's” perspective to explain change recipients' reaction to an innovation is indirect and peripheral. This paper argues that innovation should be studied directly from the perspective of change recipients, and that their perceptions of fairness in the wake of an innovation become a key factor in their willingness to accept it. More specifically, this paper argues that the recipients' fairness perceptions mediate the impact of innovation characteristics (operationalized as “usefulness” and “ease of use”) and implementation approach on their acceptance and belief in the legitimacy of the innovation. Two studies investigated the hypothesized mediating effects of procedural fairness/outcome fairness. The field study was conducted in a real‐world technological innovation setting, but raised questions about whether the causal effect of the mediating model really existed. The scenario study was conducted in a semi‐experimental condition which had high internal validity and guaranteed the cause–effect relation. Hence, the research design of the two studies complemented each other. The multiple regression analyses using the criteria proposed by Baron and Kenny were used to test the mediating models in the paper. Moreover, both Sobel tests and bootstrapping methods were used to guarantee that the mediating paths do exist among the independent variables, mediators, and the dependent variables. Both the field study and the scenario study showed that most of our hypotheses were supported, and change recipients had strong psychological reactions to the innovation and how the innovation was implemented in terms of fairness perceptions. Change recipients' perception of procedural and outcome fairness mediated the impact of innovation characteristics and implementation approach on their acceptance of the innovation and the perceived legitimacy of the innovation. The results disclosed that the change recipients' fairness perceptions were a key step for their sense‐making process of an innovation and its implementation. The results also indicated that studying change from recipients' perspective, as well as trying to understand their fairness perceptions, can broaden our knowledge about change. Other theoretical and practical implications were also discussed.     

Antecedents and Consequences of Reflexivity in New Product Idea Screening*

Pre‐development activities, such as new product idea screening, are considered to play an important role in innovation success. At the screening stage, a management team evaluates new product and service ideas and makes a first go/no‐go decision under high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity. Paying more attention to the decision‐making process in the screening stage appears important because too rigorous a use of rigid evaluation criteria and inflexible methods have been shown to have an adverse effect on market performance of novel products. The present study proposes and tests a model of team‐level antecedents and consequences of reflexivity—the explicit evaluation and discussion of working methods, tools, and criteria within a team. Recently, researchers have proposed that cognitive style and leadership style are major antecedents of decision‐making performance. This study posits that reflexivity offers an explanation of how transformational leadership and cognitive style can eventually affect decision‐making performance in the context of new product idea screening. Results of a survey among 126 top managers from large international firms show that the positive effects of transformational leadership and procedural rationality on the effectiveness and efficiency of screening decision making are largely mediated by reflexivity at the team level. This suggests that screening teams can improve their decision making in the following ways: committee chairs are advised to stimulate openness, develop a stop‐and‐think attitude among screening committee members, and support argument‐based discussion in order to adapt available decision tools, models, and checklists whenever needed. The paper concludes with implications, limitations of the study, and suggestions for further research.