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Design leadership at scale requires leaders who design the design function, establish a thriving environment for the creative team, and shape the design organization to drive progress, advance innovation, and enhance meaningful customer experiences. To examine the foundations of successful design leadership, the authors performed extensive in-depth interviews with design leaders working for Fortune 500 organizations across industries. Based on these insights, Design Leadership Ignited delineates a pathway to design excellence, which includes establishing a forward-looking strategy and an adequate organizational structure for the design function, empowering the design team, and scaling the impact of design across the entire organization. This book takes the position that a core challenge in the journey towards design excellence is the need to recognize and balance the often-contradictory objectives and activities that design leaders encounter. Combining their practitioner experience and research, the authors provide a framework to embrace the complexity of design leadership that will elevate design at scale.

In the 1960s, influential thinkers defined design as a rational problem-solving approach to deal with the challenges of sustainable human development. In 2009, a design consultant and a business academic selected some of these ideas and successfully branded them with the term “design thinking.” As a result, design thinking has developed into a stream of innovation management research discussing how to innovate faster and better in competitive markets. This article aims to foster a reconsideration of the purposes of design thinking moving forward, in view of the sustainable development challenges intertwined with accelerating innovation in a perpetual economic growth paradigm. To this end, we use a problematization method to challenge innovation management research on design thinking. As part of this method, we first systematically collect and critically analyze the articles in this research stream. We uncover a prominent focus on economic impact, while social and environmental impacts remain largely neglected. To overcome this critical limitation, we integrate design thinking with responsible innovation theorizing. We develop a framework for responsible design thinking, explaining how to apply this approach beyond a private interest and competitive advantage logic, to address sustainable development challenges, such as climate change, resource depletion, poverty, and injustice. The framework contributes to strengthening the practical relevance of design thinking and its theoretical foundations. To catalyze this effort, we propose an agenda for future research.

After almost 30 years of publications, Journal of Business Ethics (JBE) has achieved the position of main marketplace for business ethics discussion and knowledge generation. Given the large amount of knowledge produced, an assessment of the state of the art could benefit both the constructive development of the discipline and the further growth of the journal itself. As the evolution of a discipline is set to be reflected in the evolution of its leading journal, we attempt to characterize changes in the intellectual structure of business ethics through a bibliometric analysis of articles published in JBE. Specifically, we conduct a knowledge-stock analysis to assess the evolution, major trends, and current state of the journal. Additionally, we use citation and co-citation analysis to provide an accurate description of the content and the advancement of research in business ethics. Through the results of our analysis, we are able to: (1) pinpoint the characteristics of the growing stock of knowledge published by JBE over the years; (2) identify the most influential works on business ethics research; and (3) detect the formation and evolution of schools of thought in business ethics.

Purpose Design thinking is widely recognized as an effective problem-solving approach in the professional and academic world, albeit with varying interpretations. It has been studied in multiple forms – as a tool, a practice, a skill and a mindset – leading to ongoing debates about its fundamental nature. This study aims to explore the use of design thinking in practice and determine how its application varies depending on the characteristics of the innovation projects, namely, the types of goals pursued and the level of uncertainty involved. Design/methodology/approach Using a survey methodology and a knowledge-intensive empirical setting, this study analyzes a data set of 221 innovation consulting projects based on design thinking conducted by European consulting firms and design agencies. Findings By analyzing the survey data, the authors identify six distinct sets of design thinking practices: discovering user needs, understanding the problem addressed, challenging existing assumptions, navigating the problem-solution pair, ideating through visualizations and learning through prototypes. The authors also identify configurations of these design thinking practices that are used to address different innovation project goals and levels of uncertainty. Practical implications The study draws attention to the need for design thinking practitioners to be aware of how different innovation project goals and levels of uncertainty can be pursued/addressed through the use of alternative configurations of design thinking practices. Originality/value To the best of the authors knowledge, this study is one of the first large-scale quantitative analyses of the nature of design thinking in action, providing a solid foundation for future research on design thinking.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to advance the current understanding of organisational conditions that facilitate service design. Specifically, the focus is on organisational capabilities, interactive practices and individual abilities as units of analysis across service system levels. Grounded in design principles, the paper conceptualises and delineates illustrative service design conditions and introduces a respective service design capability-practice-ability (CPA) portfolio. In doing so, an emerging microfoundations perspective in the context of service design is advanced. Design/methodology/approach Conceptual paper. Findings This paper identifies and delineates a CPA that contributes to service design and ultimately customer experiences. The service design CPA consists of six illustrative constellations of service design capabilities, practices and abilities, which operate on different organisational levels. The service design CPA builds the foundation for in-depth research implications and future research opportunities. Practical implications The CPA framework suggests that if an organisation seeks to optimise service design and subsequent customer experiences, then individual- and organisational-level (cap)abilities and interactive practices should be optimised and synchronised across specific CPA constellations. Originality/value This paper provides the first microfoundations perspective for service design. It advances marketing theory through multilevel theorising around service design capabilities, practices and abilities and overcomes extant limitations of insular theorising in this context.

Purpose – Improving the commercial success rate of innovations requires alternative approaches based on social science methodologies for identifying subtle, emerging changes in consumer needs and behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to address this call by proposing trend spotting to guide innovation researchers and service managers towards innovations that are more in accordance with emerging consumer needs. Design/methodology/approach – The authors develop, describe, and employ a methodology for trend spotting to derive eight consumer trends that will have a strong influence on their choices. To provide further insights into these trends, the authors label and describe three customer segments as a function of life-cycle. The goal is to provide a framework for identifying innovations that are of higher value consumers. Findings – The authors identified eight consumer trends, i.e. Always on the go, Always logged-in, Quality information faster, Nowism, Look at me now, Privacy, Sustainable living, and return on time (RoT), present across the three life-stage segments, i.e. Young free and single, Chaos in my life, and Got my life back. Practical implications – For illustration purpose, the authors elaborate on the trend RoT and employ their findings and framework to illustrate how the airline industry may derive ideas for valuable innovations. Originality/value – To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time trend spotting has been employed in the field of service marketing and service innovations.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the service constellation perspective affects innovation strategies and potentially contributes to the innovation literature, proposing a research agenda.Design methodology approach - By analyzing the notion of a service constellation, the authors provide an overview of major implications for service innovation research and practice.Findings - Firms and service innovation researchers need to focus on the perceived consumer value of the constellation rather than on individual services. The authors illustrate how service innovation from the constellation perspective requires coordination and synchronization between projects and different approaches to portfolio management and screening.Originality value - Adoption of the service constellation perspective creates new opportunities.

This study is an attempt to approach design management from a cultural perspective. Specifically, the paper assumes that design orientation reflects an underlying organisational culture that distinguishes design-oriented companies from the rest and reinforces their capability to generate competitive advantage from design management. The aim is to disentangle the main characteristics of this culture. A case study research approach was adopted to gain some initial insights on the cultural characteristics of the population considered in the present study. The results of the field study identify a set of general values and product-related values shared by the design-oriented companies considered in this research. In addition, the existence of functional sub-cultures and cross-cultural differences is analysed, together with a discussion on how organisational culture and functional sub-cultures can co-exist in this specific context. Although a rich set of qualitative data was garthered, the number of cases is still too small to consider replications and opportunities for theory building. The paper proposes a structured description of design orientation from a multiple level of analysis (organisational culture and individual sub-cultures). It provides useful insights on interaction and harmonisation between these levels, leading to a better understanding of the drivers of design-oriented behaviour. Additionally, the cross-cultural setting of the study addresses the interconnectedness of cross-cultural design practices and design-oriented managerial values.