Ill-structured management problems are of paramount importance for organizations today. As they are complex to solve, they are undertaken by teams of diverse individuals who make use of tools to help them in solving such problems. Most tools either focus on supporting collaborative practices or are dedicated to solving specific ill-structured problems. In this paper, we bridge these two perspectives and provide design principles for tools that both support collaboration and are tailored for specific ill-structured problems. We derived these design principles from our participant observation of two critical cases of such collaborative tools: the Business Model Canvas and the Team Alignment Map. We lay the theoretical and design foundations for future developments of similar collaborative tools. Our paper illustrates the value that the IS discipline can bring to the increasing call for a design approach to management by rigorously developing tools for co-design.

The Business Model Canvas project cleared the path for the development of a new tool type that we refer to as visual inquiry tools. Such tools build on design thinking techniques to allow management practitioners to jointly inquire into specific strategic management problems. As the interest in and the emergence of visual inquiry tools gain momentum, it is important to formalize the design knowledge that future designers can build on to develop such tools. Thus, we propose a design theory for visual inquiry tools based on the design knowledge accumulated within and across three projects: the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas, and the Team Alignment Map. We outline the design principles (among others) that should be followed for developing visual inquiry tools for other strategic management problems. Our study addresses the lack of guidance in the development of visual inquiry tools and the lack of methodological guidance in design science research on how to theorize and formalize knowledge across multiple projects. We provide a methodological process for analyzing multiple-project data by bridging methodological insights from design science research and qualitative methods from the social sciences.

Collaboration has been increasingly required to address the current challenges faced by organizations. With digitalization, these challenges are more and more complex but have common characteristics: they concern the organization as a whole, involve different and heterogeneous stakeholders, and evolve during the organization's lifetime. Moreover, they are at the heart of a paradox: they are of paramount importance for companies, but they are very difficult to grasp. Although practitioners have developed very different definitions and perspectives, each challenge needs to be collectively addressed as the result of discussion and inquiry from different perspectives. These challenges are, for instance, developing innovative solutions to face rapidly changing environments, digitalizing processes, developing business ecosystems, defining projects or initiatives, fostering creativity, or designing and evaluating a new business model. Recently a "new" generation of tools has appeared. These tools are commonly called "canvas" as they were initially inspired by the Business Model Canvas. In fact, we designate this family of tools as visual inquiry tools or visual collaborative tools. These tools have common features that allow diverse stakeholders that face a joint problem to address the aforementioned challenges: • First, developing a shared language and understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.

Team coordination over long time scales has been analyzed through two dominant perspectives: the contingency approach and the discursive approach. While they produced extensive theoretical contributions, these two perspectives are not well-suited to understand team coordination in changing and uncertain situations such as innovation projects. In this paper, we propose a design approach to coordination, which we define as the joint inquiry and construction by teams of their common ground. We instantiated our conceptual model into a tool called the Team Alignment Map, which allows team members to design their interdependencies. We evaluated the effectiveness of the tool within 22 innovation projects in two different settings. Our findings suggest that the tool facilitated the creation of shared understanding between team members, and allowed them to coordinate flexibly and welcome the shifting requirements of their projects. These findings suggest that conceptualizing coordination as a design process is well-suited to innovation projects.