Ileana Stigliani

• PhD in Business Administration and Management, Bocconi University
• Professor (Assistant) at Imperial College London

Design thinking is an innovation approach that emphasizes developing and testing hypotheses about the desirability , feasibility, and viability of an idea through iterative experimentation. Although widely used, there is limited empirical evidence to support the effectiveness of experimentation practices in design thinking projects. Similarly, the...

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 th...

Organizational aesthetics comprises a way of understanding organizational life based on immediate sensory reactions (i.e., sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) to the material components of organizing (e.g., artifacts, physical settings, and material practices). Despite the growing interest in the topic, however, research is fragmented across m...

Scholars and practitioners acknowledge the role of design, and specifically design thinking, as a driver of innovation and change. Design thinking is gaining attention in the business community beyond the traditional product innovation realm and is increasingly promoted as an engine for the creation of novel user experiences, new businesses, strate...

Academia is a world filled with bright people searching for explanations for phenomena around us, and developing and testing new theories to explain the hows and whys of our experience. It is a world defined by a drive to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and is ostensibly characterized by intellectual enlightenment and relentless progress. But i...

Scholars and practitioners are acknowledging the central role that design can play in innovation. Design is increasingly becoming a strategic source of competitive advantage, to the point that scholars investigate its managerial side and its impact in the creation of value. Design Thinking, in particular, is making the headlines, with an extremely...

A growing body of research on how organizations engage with their histories has shown that organizational members revisit history in the light of present-day concerns to inspire or legitimate future courses of action. Studies of the processes through which organizational history is brought to bear on the present and future, however, remain rare. To...

We inductively studied the sensemaking and sensegiving processes used by industry founders in the co‐formation of organizational and industry identities in the emerging industry of Service Design. Our findings illustrate how the sensemaking and sensegiving processes that revolved around the new “Service Design” label allowed the two sets of industr...

Research on design and designers has emphasized the tacit nature of the aesthetic knowledge that these professionals draw upon to make decisions about formal properties of objects and spaces, but is less clear about how design teams address the difficulties associated with expressing and sharing this type of knowledge. A ten-month ethnography in a...

Design thinking comprises an approach to problem solving that uses tools traditionally utilized by designers of commercial products, processes, and environments (e.g., designing a new car or the layout of a new airport). While design thinking was originally introduced as an approach that would work best when infused into the culture of an organizat...

In this paper, we study the way that nascent occupations constructing an occu- pational mandate invoke not only skills and expertise or a new technology to distinguish themselves from other occupations, but also their values. We stud- ied service design, an emerging occupation whose practitioners aim to under- stand customers and help organizations...

This study investigates the activities that service designers, as members of a nascent occupation, engaged in to construct their occupational mandate. Building on the literature on occupations, the study shows what members of new occupations need to do before achieving institutional support, and, more specifically, sheds light on the practices they...

The entrepreneurial growth literature is extensive, but research focusing on questions such as how firms grow, why they grow according to different patterns, how the decisions about growing or not growing are made, and the contextual dimensions within which growth takes place, has been neglected. This annual review article explores such issues: it...

This paper reviews research on product design in the broad domain of business studies. It highlights established and emerging perspectives and lines of inquiry, and organizes them around three core areas, corresponding to different stages of the design process (design activities, design choices, design results). Avenues for further research at the...

A growing body of research is drawing attention to the material practices that support verbal exchanges and cognitive processes in collective sensemaking. In this study, building on an ethnographic study of a design consulting firm, we develop a process model that accounts for the interplay between conversational and material practices in the trans...

This case describes the innovation process at Engine, a Service Design consultancy based in London. Engine is one of the first service design consultancies in London along with others such as Live|Work, Prospect Design and Think Public, and it has played a key role in the development of service design as a recognised practice. The case presents an...

The management of design has emerged as central to the operational and strategic options of any successful organization. The Handbook of Design Management presents a state-of-the-art overview of the subject - its methodologies, current debates, history and future. The Handbook covers the breadth of principles, methods and practices that shape desig...

The article discusses the supportive role of organizational artifacts in the creative process at a product-design and innovation consultancy. The discussion refers to an ethnographic study of corporate culture, employees' interpretation of the firm, the external perception of the corporate image, "visual tools" and creative cognition, the participa...