Integrating Design into Organizations: The Coevolution of Design Capabilities

Björklund, Tua; Maula, Hanna; Soule, Sarah A.; Maula, Jesse

doi:10.1177/0008125619898245

Cited by 41 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…When implementing design thinking in a company context, further factors in the internal environment might affect its effect on project performance. Previous research shows that design thinking might be incompatible with prevailing business practices in a company and can create structural dilemmas and tensions between different departments (Carlgren et al, 2016; Kupp, Anderson, & Reckhenrich, 2017; Björklund, Maula, Soule, & Maula, 2020; Hölzle & Rhinow, 2019). While our findings suggest that the application level of design thinking practices is positively related to project outcomes, managers need to be aware of the readiness and compatibility of their focal company to design thinking practices.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contributions and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This interview‐based study also reveals several challenges organizations face when implementing design thinking such as difficulties to acquire the necessary skills, a misfit of the design thinking processes with existing processes and structures and issues with measuring the benefit of design thinking to name a few (Carlgren et al, 2016). More challenges that arise from tensions between design, engineering and business disciplines are highlighted in the study of Björklund, Maula, Soule, and Maula (2020). In her exploratory multiple case study, Liedtka (2018a) examines how 22 organizations apply design thinking in practice and develops hypotheses about how the practices can influence innovation outcomes.…”

Section: Theoretical Foundationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Living up to the expectations: The effect of design thinking on project success

et al. 2020

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Both academics and practitioners have paid increased attention to design thinking over the past years. Yet, there is still little empirical evidence about its effectiveness for achieving success in innovation projects. Based on the existing design thinking literature, we conceptualize the common themes underlying design thinking to describe the application level of design thinking practices in projects. Then, we elaborate on the performance relevance of design thinking. Besides a direct impact on project performance, we draw on organizational behaviour literature and argue psychological empowerment to be a core mechanism through which design thinking affects project performance. We test our hypotheses with 160 students participating in 62 innovation projects for companies. We find the effect of the application level of design thinking practices on project performance to be fully mediated by psychological empowerment. Our study contributes to the literature by providing empirical support for the performance relevance of design thinking and the underlying mechanism. Furthermore, we shift the perspective on design thinking from being an approach to solve complex or wicked problems to an approach facilitating motivation and empowerment.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contributions and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theoretical Foundationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Living up to the expectations: The effect of design thinking on project success

et al. 2020

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“…While design thinking still lacks a clear definition, it has become widely used to describe a variety of designerly activities [24,28] and received some critique for maintaining the status quo of designer-centered development strategies rather necessitating co-design [29]. However, problem framing is at the core of most academic descriptions of design thinking and how it should be applied [24,30], as well as a key attribute to many engineering and technology organizations adopting design thinking practices [31]. How problems are framed guide what is considered as relevant to the issue at hand [30], and thus at a key position when attempting to understand societal issues connected to technological solutions.…”

Section: Teaching Societal Issues and Innovation In Engineering Educamentioning

confidence: 99%

Educating Future Engineers: Student Perceptions of the Societal Linkages of Innovation Opportunities

Celik

Kirjavainen

Björklund

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings

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Engineering education traditionally emphasizes technological solutions that focus heavily on students' technical skills. However, for innovations that create an impact, it is essential to link this technical knowledge to societal considerations. This paper describes a problemcentered approach towards introducing mechanical engineering students to sustainable, ethical and collaborative innovation, through an analysis of student work and feedback gathered from a ten-week long pilot conducted as part of a compulsory, Master's level, academic year-long Mechanical Engineering course. During the pilot, student groups worked on broadly phrased challenges derived from an ongoing EU project on developing societal applications for technology, choosing one of seven challenges ranging from changing rain patterns in cities to IoT technologies and data security. Teaching was divided into three interconnected sections on sustainable development, technology and ethics, and collaboration. Each of these sections combined theory with practice through panels with experts from academia and industry and hands-on workshops, encouraging the students to consider multidimensional aspects of their chosen challenge and its consequences for the entire system it links to. A variety of design thinking methods were introduced for exploring the challenges holistically to define and reframe the problem at hand, identify ethical dilemmas and understand the needs of stakeholders for successful collaboration. At the end of each section, students were asked to reflect on their incorporation of societal considerations to the challenge they were working on in the form of group reports. At the end of the pilot, the students presented a project proposal of a direction for solving their challenge. This paper looks at how engineering students operationalize multilayered aspects of societal issues through these reports and project proposals for 19 teams that completed both the first and last group assignment. The results of this study suggest that introducing creative, holistic, problem-solving skills into engineering education in a hands-on manner creates numerous advantages for supporting the understanding of systemic, innovative solutions that have a societal impact and go beyond solving the technological problem. Nine sub-themes to sustainability, ethics and collaboration were identified from the deliverables; environment, economy and culture, fairness, privacy and responsibility, stakeholders, diversity and co-creation. The students' ability to identify and apply these nine measured sub-themes of sustainability, ethics, and collaboration improved statistically significantly in seven out of nine themes. The results of this study encourage linking engineering courses to societal issues through minor interventions, in order to encourage engineering students to apply a broader range of considerations in scoping innovation projects. Additionally, the coding scheme developed here can be used to gauge the level of consideration for societal issues given by st...

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“…Concerning conceptual fixations, Bjorklund and colleagues point out that in large industrial organisations with a dominance of employees with engineering backgrounds, the lack of design thinking awareness "boxes in" designers, making it hard for them to succeed internally with their ideas and designs [55]. Moreover, design thinkers are often spread throughout an organisation, without a strategic bundling of these design resources.…”

Section: Need To Combine Domain Expertise and Design Thinkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

Wasserbaur

Sakao

2020

Sustainability

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Design for sustainability needs to apply a societal perspective. The purpose of this paper is to combine the concept of design fixation with higher levels of analysis. Design fixation is used to describe a blind adherence to known concepts during the design process. It is used mostly at the micro level of design with the focus on the activities of an individual designer or a group of designers. In this paper, design fixation gets conceptually lifted to the levels of the organisation and the institution. We ask how the understanding of design fixation helps to achieve higher resource efficiency. Examples of organisational and institutional design fixations are presented. A System Dynamics model is used to simulate the impacts of design fixation on resource use of a sociotechnical laundry systems. Applying this lens suggests that in order to solve societal design fixations, systemic parameters like infrastructure, business models, or policies need to be considered design parameters. The simulation results show that high-level design fixations can have significant impact on resource use.

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Integrating Design into Organizations: The Coevolution of Design Capabilities

Cited by 41 publications

References 27 publications

Living up to the expectations: The effect of design thinking on project success

Living up to the expectations: The effect of design thinking on project success

Educating Future Engineers: Student Perceptions of the Societal Linkages of Innovation Opportunities

Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

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