Organizer: Lisa Carlgren, Chalmers U. of Technology
Organizer: Sebastian Fixson, Babson College
Organizer: Jeanne Liedtka, U. of Virginia
Organizer: Christi Zuber, Northwestern U.
Presenter: Katharina Hoelzle, U. of Potsdam
Presenter: Sihem Ben Mahmoud-Jouini, HEC Paris
Presenter: Ingo Christian Rauth, IE Business School
Presenter: Ileana Stigliani, Imperial College Business School
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| Over the last decade, Design Thinking (DT) as an innovation practice has experienced substantial interest across various industries (e.g., consumer goods, health care, finance/ insurance, etc.). Many firms have turned to DT to improve their organization’s user- centeredness and their innovation capability more generally. Companies pursuing a whole range of paths to accomplish this goal, including training large portions of their employees in the practice of DT (e.g., Infosys), creating a corps of internal innovation catalysts to spread DT techniques throughout the organization (e.g., Intuit), and simply acquiring entire design firms to add DT capability to their existing ones (e.g., McKinsey acquiring Luna). Despite these numerous initiatives, anecdotal evidence suggests that successful and sustainable implementation of DT can be quite challenging. Compared to this broad interest from practitioners in DT, rigorous research is lagging behind in explaining the precise mechanisms through which DT improves an organization’s innovation performance. In addition to exhibiting this practice-theory gap, the emerging research on DT also appears somewhat fragmented. Scholars from different disciplines such as operations, strategy, organizational behavior, and design appear to have approached DT like the proverbial blind men have understood the elephant: every blind man touched a different part of the elephant and interpreted his experience in a different way. This PDW has two goals. First, following one of the core tenets of DT it aims to bring some user-centeredness to the DT research community, and second, collectively exposing different perspectives on DT to help cross- pollinate disciplinary DT research. |