Special Issue of the Journal of Business Strategy: Design and Business
Edited by: Jeanne Liedtka, Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia, Roger Martin, Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and dt ogilvie, Rutgers Business School, Rutgers University.
This special issue has been pulled together because we are passionate believers in the potential that design thinking holds for business and are tired of the “iPOD as icon” phenomenon that equates design exclusively with high-end new products.
Despite seemingly endless exhortations about the value of design in business, the conversations never seem to recognize that design holds out any promise greater than the creation of sleek, high-end products. But design offers business so much more. To illustrate this, we need to swim upstream from the act of designing to the thinking behind design in order to show how design thinking can help businesses develop better, unique and creative strategies. In this special issue, our goal is to thoroughly explore the concept of design thinking and demonstrate how business can fully exploit its exciting potential.
Contents
Design and Business: Why Can’t We Be Friends?
Roger Martin
Although design is more important in business than ever before, designers and business people often find working together fraught with tension and misunderstandings. The author suggests that the key attributes of validity and reliability can frame a more productive way for designers and business people to work together. He outlines five practical actions that designers can take and five equivalent actions for business people.
Artistry for the Strategist
Hilary Austen Johnson
Artistry is not an exclusive talent but rather a learned, emergent capability that allows practitioners to integrate mastery and originality as they work. The problems faced by today’s practitioners often reflect ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity. The author contends that practitioners may not be able to rely on historical solutions. Artistry is an alternative capability that allows practitioners to work effectively with difficult problems.
The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit
Tony Golsby-Smith
Organizations are far better equipped with the tools for operational management and defending the status quo than they are for inventing and shaping new futures. But a new approach to strategy through design thinking can unlock fresh energy and make strategy more innovative and less data driven. Design opens a door to a new art of thinking that has been suppressed for centuries by the Western world’s addiction to logic and science as the dominant thinking paradigm.
Possibility Thinking: Lessons from Breakthrough Engineering
Robert Friedel and Jeanne Liedtka
The ability to see new possibilities is fundamental to creating innovative designs – but what do we know about state-of-the-art possibility thinking? The authors examine this topic, until now largely ignored by strategists in favour of analytics. They examine a selection of breakthrough engineering projects and, from these, derive eight different ways of illuminating new possibilities.
Abduction: a Pre-Condition for the Intelligent Design of Strategy
Nicholas Dew
Abduction may be defined as deducing the best possible explanation from information that is surprising or anomalous – both very typical in strategic decision-making. Strategists can gain much from knowing how to use abduction well because it is frequently integral to problem defining which in turn sets the stage for possibility thinking and choosing the best alternative. Good abductive thinking therefore is a pre-condition for intelligent designing in strategy.
Daily Life, Not Markets: Customer-centred Design
Vijay Kumar and Patrick Whitney
Executives were shocked to find that in six weeks a research team unfamiliar with life in Hong Kong could identify wholly new potential markets through research that revealed unarticulated consumer needs. As companies try to gain a deeper understanding of consumers, they are increasingly turning to user-observation and ethnographic processes. The authors describe a research method that allows companies to conduct observational research for application and re-usability on a large scale.
Learning to Design: Giving Purpose to Heart, Hand and Mind
Sabine Junginger
Design thinking is becoming a topic in strategic management. This article offers a glimpse into education in design schools and links it with design education in the business organization to make basic design thinking and methods accessible to managers.
Systematic inquiry into the organization through design thinking is an iterative activity that can be launched in almost any environment with few resources.
The Practice of Breakthrough Strategies by Design
Heather M. A. Fraser
By embedding design methods and mindsets into strategic planning practices, an organization can leverage design practices for cultural transformation and strategic growth, moving from a framework of the ‘economics of design’ to the ‘design of economics’. While at first this model may seem either radical or abstract, those who discover its advantages find it surprisingly intuitive and practical – just what the business world needs in the face of high-stakes complexities and change.
Strategizing Through Playful Design
Claus D. Jacobs and Loizos Heracleous
The authors propose a view of strategizing as a playful design practice and illustrate this view by describing a process for fostering effective strategic play. They outline the benefits of the process and how executives can play effectively. Strategizing through playful design is a useful complement to dry, conventional strategic planning processes and helps to open up and orient fruitful debate about an organization’s unique strategic challenges.
About the Journal of Business Strategy
The Journal of Business Strategy publishes articles designed to help readers develop successful business strategies across all industries. Written in magazine rather than scholarly format, the articles focus on the practical aspect of business theories and implications for real life business situations. CEOs as well as senior and middle managers will find the reading compelling. Leading strategists, academics, consultants and front-line managers contribute to make the journal a unique blend of ideas on strategy and practice.
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