Nicky Nedergaardis employed by the Danish Design Centre as an industrial PhD fellow and affiliated with the Department of Marketing at Copenhagen Business School. His dissertation examines relationships between corporate brands and strategic management of design and innovation.
Richard Gyrd-Jonesis an Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing at Copenhagen Business School and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Marketing at Griffith University. His main areas of research are brand management, corporate branding and stakeholder relations. His work is focused on examining management challenges of implementing brands across organisations. Current research projects include integrating brand communities into brand innovation processes, the impact of functional silos in implementing corporate rebrands and studying emerging social practices around brands.ABSTRACT The role of the corporate brand as a strategic resource in orienting innovation projects has only been cursorily addressed in the literature. As innovation is a key driver of brand growth, this article discusses how corporate brands can contribute to both guiding and driving such innovation processes. The article applies the concept of design thinking to develop a framework for Sustainable Brand-based Innovation. It is suggested that traditional market-oriented strategies should be complemented with intuitive thinking and abductive reasoning as associated with the concept of design thinking. On the basis of this framework, a conceptual model is elaborated integrating the three key management imperatives of: (i) orienting innovation and investments around the brand (brand orientation); (ii) thinking on a human scale to generate unique customer insights (intuitive customer orientation); and (iii) considering the current and future scope of firm resources needed to attain and sustain competitive advantages (resource orientation). The article illustrates the framework through analysing the processes behind new business development and innovation of the luxury consumer electronics brand Bang & Olufsen. Implications for brand leadership in innovation management and avenues for further research into the brand-innovation interface are discussed.
This article sets out to explain structures of design management practices around the implementation of product innovation strategies that rely on collaborations with external design consultants, what this article refers to as Collaborative Design Innovation (CDI) strategies. Whilst design management practices for implementing collaborative approaches to product design innovation have been widely described in design and innovation management literatures, we still know very little about the organizational mechanisms affecting such structures and configurations of design management practices. This study aims to build theoretical explanations as to how we may understand structures of enacted CDI management practices, which is approached through analyses of how firms strive to strategically align design management practices and (corporate) brand management. First, the article presents a theoretical framework for analysing such strategic alignment by elaborating relational perspectives on different strategic approaches to brand management – conceptualized as ‘brand logics’ – and CDI management practices. Second, this framework is then applied to a multiple case study of six Danish small- and medium-sized enterprises operating in the Danish interior design industry. Through within- and cross-case grounded analyses empirical findings reveal relational patterns between two brand logics and two dominant structures of design management practices. As the main contribution of the article, findings suggest that observed differences in enacted structures of CDI management practices across case-companies may be explained on the basis of understanding firm dominant brand logics. Implications for design management theory and practice conclude the article.
In this article, we discuss and argue for the value of working with strategic design in organizational settings through inventive research practices rooted in co-design and design anthropology. More specifically, we propose a process of collaborative experimentation staged as a series
of events that establish relations between everyday organizational perspectives and practices and organizational strategic documents. We base our analytical discussions and reflections on a research project carried out in the organizational setting of a labour union. We describe how a programme‐experiment
informed design research approach, driven by and reliant on collaborative explorations, provides a scaffold for unlocking organizational strategic management visions and goals in interaction with transformational perspectives on organizational practices. We frame our approach as a research
strategy of working ‘from within’ the organizational setting, which focuses on staging dialogues between the experimental and the managerial. Such a disposition, we argue, offers important alternatives to management literatures’ current approaches to strategic design
research.
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