Design Authorship: an intrinsic driver of designer-entrepreneurs

Abstract

This paper describes the entrepreneurial journey of product designers and the driver that makes them take an idea into the market. Following a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach, a multiple-phase data generation method explored the entrepreneurial journey of eleven designer-entrepreneurs (D-entrepreneurs). The paper describes the driver named design authorship (D-authorship) and why it is essential in the entrepreneurial journey of designers. The study identified two types of D-authorship: a) the inside-out, where D-entrepreneurs spent considerable time obtaining perfection in the product without any user feedback involved, and b) the outside-in, where D-entrepreneurs build their product as a result of a systematic user-centric approach.