The scholarly and practitioner literatures have both described the potential benefits of Design Thinking (DT) to develop innovations. Innovation processes are widely characterized by continuous competing demands, which generate tensions. The paper analyzes a DT innovation journey, focusing on the struggles and triggers of participants as they work through conflicting demands. Following a qualitative inductive research design, the study reports on the experience of a group of management students exposed intentionally for the first time to the introduction of DT practices in a class setting. The originality of the paper lies in the fact that it analyzes participants' particular points of view, including feelings and cognitions, during the overall process. This angle allows identifying and describing three main struggles and triggers (destabilizing, non-deciding, abstracting) for new adopters in each step of the DT process, which represent a cultural clash with their background. The study contributes to a better understanding of DT by acknowledging its challenges and costs, to be able to apply it as an organizational resource when facing competing demands. Moreover, it aims to provide some initial steps on how to move organizations to a culture based on collaboration and experimentation, able to better cope with innovation tensions.
Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been leading innovation processes, where the upsurge of digital technology has overpowering implications on competitive positioning, firm’s value chains and overall business model. Value creation facilitated by emerging digital technologies alters costs, as well as process performance. Due to field research and in-depth interviews with owners and managers of SMEs in North-East Italy area, we combine and analyze evidence of the contingent challenges companies face while trying to redesign their business model. Our results point out that being able to accumulate and put into action external ideas can be vital in supplementing internal knowledge base and therefore crucial in escaping technological lock-ins; thus, imposing efforts toward digital transformation offers favorable outcoes.
Old Town Bari is the center of Bari City and the main city of Apulia region, in the southeast of Italy. For ages, it was a place neglected to its own community due to the high criminality level. This study follows a social innovation initiative launched by a young Bari collective to leverage education using crowdsourcing knowledge, in order to better understand how to develop crowdsourcing for effective social innovation. To address this research question, the author conducted action research on a 12 days workshop, organized by the collective, in the Old Town of Bari. The workshop aimed to create a School Open Source with the help of the crowd, which was engaged on promoting and co-creating the social initiative. Furthermore the researcher collected and analyzed the online discussions, paths and topics from the days of the workshop to the opening of the School. The study reveals how crowdsourcing acted as an opportunity to build a new community which revitalized the local social environment. The author also found that design processes played a major role on the community creation and instructed new governance models. Additionally, digital communications built a network, which is able to generate and regenerate the local socio-economical fabric and connect it with the rest of the world. These results indicate a first step towards a proposal for an open innovation model for social innovation which combines online crowd engagement with offline activities and where design processes nurture the sense of belonging between community and territory.
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