This article focuses on a specific form of collaboration between academic researchers and practitioners: co‐design. Generally, the strategic use of co‐design is considered to be beneficial because, among other reasons, it better aligns outcomes to user needs. In addition, active stakeholder participation engenders new network developments and strengthens existing links. Despite this, the extent to which the co‐design approach could be used to foster new knowledge and/or practices is hardly explored. Thus, our research applied co‐design methods to organizational practices and examined how they may bring about benefits for academic researchers and practitioners collaborating in the context of not‐for‐profit organizations. According to our findings, all stakeholders considered co‐design to be useful, as it helped them achieve desirable outcomes in a more inclusive and collaborative manner. The findings confirmed a number of benefits, among them confidence building. The size of organizations did not appear to affect the process or the outcomes. While most knowledge co‐created through these types of projects tends to be practical in nature, new theoretical knowledge was generated through critical examination of the process/results as well as through individual/group reflection. We consider this aspect to be particularly useful for other researchers and practitioners interested in applying co‐design principles to the not‐for‐profit sector.

This study explores the question: Within the context of global brands management and the need for integrating local identities, how does Starbucks achieve global consistency and meaningfully localised experiences? Through a review of literature and a series of interviews with store designers, design managers and brand concept experts at Starbucks, we compiled the most commonly applied branding and design methods, with an emphasis on the locally relevant spatial experiences the global brand delivers. Moreover, we set out to classify our findings in a way that can assist other brand and experience design teams in overcoming shard challenges. Our findings focus on the management of the grounding brand concept, as well as operations and real estate teams. Through presenting some tools, manuals, guidelines and sample checklists, we suggest that store design teams in different locations can build strong, locally relevant spatial experiences that tie in successfully with the brand’s global principles.

Today the role of curating extends beyond the museum field: websites are curated, commercial firms establish functional roles entitled “curator”, and individuals in the creative economy use social media platforms to curate their lives and cultural product as brands. Curating has been extended and elevated today because design has become a more critical and integrative factor in brand development on both the organizational and individual levels (Kennedy, 2012). Curating is one way to manage the brand’s meaning. It is a chaordic system (Hock, 2005; van Einatten, 2001) that situates the complex process of editing, merchandising and documenting the brand’s offering in co-created situations with the customer. Yet, the literature is lacking in explicitly exploring and documenting how curating is used in branding.

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