The scholarly and practitioner literatures have both described the potential benefits of Design Thinking (DT) to develop innovations. Innovation processes are widely characterized by continuous competing demands, which generate tensions. The paper analyzes a DT innovation journey, focusing on the struggles and triggers of participants as they work through conflicting demands. Following a qualitative inductive research design, the study reports on the experience of a group of management students exposed intentionally for the first time to the introduction of DT practices in a class setting. The originality of the paper lies in the fact that it analyzes participants' particular points of view, including feelings and cognitions, during the overall process. This angle allows identifying and describing three main struggles and triggers (destabilizing, non-deciding, abstracting) for new adopters in each step of the DT process, which represent a cultural clash with their background. The study contributes to a better understanding of DT by acknowledging its challenges and costs, to be able to apply it as an organizational resource when facing competing demands. Moreover, it aims to provide some initial steps on how to move organizations to a culture based on collaboration and experimentation, able to better cope with innovation tensions.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the specific field of arts entrepreneurship by focussing on the practices of vertical dance; a language of contemporary dance where dancers act on a vertical axis, moving suspended on the surface of buildings and walls. The authors’ focus on vertical dance as a meaningful corporal practice to explore the particular combination of dance and human movement, going beyond its purely metaphoric dimension. Design/methodology/approach The authors’ adopt a micro-social perspective, observing the practices (Gherardi, 2012; Nicolini, 2012; Sicca, 2000), that took place from 2013 to 2015 in the daily work of Wanda Moretti, a Venetian choreographer and co-founder of the company “Il posto”, observed in different contexts of artistic practices (Zembylas, 2014). Research limitations/implications Deconstructing the overlapping dimensions that compose the space in our daily experience (force of gravity and the supporting surface), vertical dance clarifies how often we undervalue the complexity of the space and, at the same time, opens up the way for a better understanding and investigation of entrepreneurship in artistic fields. Originality/value The study sheds light on the way in which different categories, such as the human body, space, and movement, are a particular entanglement of elements, useful in highlighting some of the fundamental assumptions at the heart of the field of entrepreneurship. The heterogeneous complexity of space and bodies is emphasised, challenging its ordinary conceptualisation.