Tua A. Björklund

• DSc (tech.), MA (behav.)
• Assistant Professor at Aalto University

Organizational leaders are increasingly turning to design approaches as a panacea for uncertainty and disruption. However, frictions between design and typical engineering and management practices make integrating design into organizations difficult. To do this well, it is necessary to foster the coevolution of two types of design capabilities: dee...

The role of designers is changing in many organizations, yet we know little of how designers themselves construct their professional identities. Based on 38 interviews of designers working in a design agency, we use Bakhtinian literary genres and chronotopes as a lens to identify four embedded narrative types. These highlight different aspects of d...

Research summary Times of crisis require entrepreneurial responses to mitigate adverse effects and address new opportunities. This study focuses on how packaged food and drink entrepreneurs in Finland took action to create and capture new value during the Covid-19 crisis. Examining 844 social media posts of 66 ventures between March and May 2020 an...

Although innovation is highly valued in organizations, early‐career professionals face a paradox of bringing in novel ideas, yet having varied latitude and support to see these new ideas through. Building on 35 critical‐incident‐based interviews with early‐career engineers in the United States, this study illuminates the socially situated dynamics...

While past research has shown that championing plays a key role in sheltering and advancing novel ideas towards implementation, relatively little is known about how adversity and failure are dealt with through championing behaviour. The current embedded case study draws from 43 interviews in a large industrial technology organization, examining new...

Crises act as critical episodes for entrepreneurs, bringing about unexpected changes and heightened uncertainty. Yet crises can also have an enabling impact, creating new opportunities. This study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic enabled new opportunities for 30 Finnish and 34 Californian food and beverage ventures. We demonstrate how the pandemi...

In order to better understand the stakeholder choices of knowledge-based organisational actors, this study focuses on a novel application of Huber's (2012) dimensions of proximity salience, namely spatial proximity, social proximity and cognitive proximity. The population of the study is made up of knowledge-based organisational actors involved in...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global disruption, but little is known about how it impacted product development. Based on interviews of 24 practicing product development leaders, we find that COVID-19 generated a unique combination of external and internal uncertainties and thus had several direct impacts on product development. Initial adaptatio...

This study examines engineering faculty and students’ views of collaboration beyond their own field, based on 12 engineering faculty interviews and a survey with 101 graduate-level mechanical engineering students. Our analysis shows that faculty members’ views on collaboration exhibit more diversity in terms of crossing disciplinary, functional, or...

Taking the perspective of users and stakeholders can help designers incorporate human-centricity in their practice. However, we know relatively little of the dynamics of perspective taking – a cognitive facet of empathy – in design processes as a situated cognitive and behavioural activity, rather than as an overall orientation. To illuminate how p...

Design scholarship has long roots in tackling wicked problems and sustainability, yet less is known about how professional designers interact with sustainability issues in practice. Based on interviews with 104 designers in 101 organizations in Finland, this study compares designer perceptions on the role of design in advancing sustainability. We i...

The past decade has seen a stark rise in the reach of design, as organisational leaders have increasingly turned to design for innovation and new customer value. Indeed, creative practices offer a much-needed addition to organisational capabilities in the face of an uncertain and volatile future. However, to make the most of the potential of design...

Muotoilun merkitys on kasvanut merkittävästi viimeisen vuosikymmenen aikana organisaatioiden johtajien huomattua sen hyödyt innovaatiotyössä sekä kehitettäessä uutta asiakasarvoa. Luovat käytännöt tarjoavatkin kaivatun lisän organisaatioiden valmiuksiin, kun ne rakentavat tulevaisuutta epävarmoissa ja epävakaissa oloissa. Jotta muotoilun hyödystä s...

Muotoilu tarjoaa ihmislähtöisen lähestymistavan muutokseen ja kehittämiseen monitahoisissa ja epävarmoissa olosuhteissa. Se on organisaatioissa usein tervetullut muutos kohti tasapainoisempaa toimintamallia, joka täydentää innovoinnin liiketoiminta- ja teknologiavetoisia lähestymistapoja. Viime vuosikymmenen aikana muotoiluajattelu ja palvelumuotoi...

This report takes stock of how design adds value and interconnects with advancing sustainability in 101 Finnish organizations.

Understanding and applying consumers' needs in product development is key to success across various industries. The failure rate of new products, however, remains high because consumer demands are not adequately addressed. To investigate the role of consumers in the product development processes of small ventures, we conducted in-depth, semi-struct...

As design research expands its horizon, there has been a recent rise in studies on nontraditional designers. Previous studies have noted the positive effect of diversity in generating ideas. Among different sources of influence, peers outside the design team have been noted for their positive impact on the design process, yet the research on this t...

The multidisciplinary Aalto University DesignBites research project interviewed 90+ packaged food and beverage entrepreneurs, as well as analyzed social media activities and industry statistics. Looking at over a thousand development actions, we are happy to present a spread of insights to treat curious consumers, educators and organizations on co-...

Engineering education traditionally emphasizes technological solutions that focus heavily on students’ technical skills. However, for innovations that create an impact, it is essential to link this technical knowledge to societal considerations. This paper describes a problem- centered approach towards introducing mechanical engineering students to...

Collaboration through innovation is central to the discussion of how today's universities can respond to new interdisciplinary challenges, competitive environments and stakeholder complexity. Innovation hubs represent a dynamic example of how the public sector, including higher education, is responding to the need for new methods and perspectives t...

Design is increasingly recognized as a competitive advantage for companies, but we know relatively little of the activities and perceptions of designers in different organizational contexts. Based on 69 semi-structured interviews with 34 in-house and 35 consultancy designers, this study investigates the type and framing of 291 reported meaningful m...

Established companies turn to new ventures for bolstering exploration activities, but we know relatively little of the product development processes of startups and new ventures and how different stakeholders are utilized in these. The current study investigated the product development activities and experiments of eight Finnish food and beverage v...

Previous research has shown the importance of contextual factors for increasing employee innovativeness, but to effectively support innovative behavior, we need to also understand what forms of support are perceived as meaningful by the employees themselves. The current study investigated the experiences of 35 early-career engineers in creating, ch...

Design thinking has a prominent role as established corporations ramp up innovation efforts focusing on user needs. Current literature provides a plethora of definitions for design thinking with variations in tools, methods and cultures. This study aims to identify differences in perception and maturity of design thinking across different contexts...

Adopting design thinking and innovation-oriented approaches in organizations is crucial but not always simple. New practices of collaboration, user-orientedness and exploration require a compatible culture to be successfully integrated into product development. This paper presents a case study based on 12 interviews of employees and managers in a l...

In this report, we share some of the early stories from the research project - how Finnish food and beverage entrepreneurs use design and social media, develop their products and take their ventures to international markets.

The products, services, technologies, ecosystems, and networks of today are much more interconnected and complicated than ever before. As a result, private and public organizations alike are turning to design to find new ways to create value, manage uncertainty and innovate in a sustainable manner. Design can play a variety of roles on different le...

Design and design thinking have boomed in the past decade, expanding design considerations into new areas of application and a wide range of organizations across industry types. What implications does the changing role of design have for design practitioners? How do they see their role going forward? To add the voice of designers themselves to rese...

Beyond engineering skills, today’s graduates are expected to have a number of professional skills by the time they enter the working world. Increasingly, innovation is one of the arenas where professional engineers should be adept at operating. However, in order to educate our students for contributing to innovation activities in their organization...

There has been a call for better understanding of the role of narratives in identity development. Simultaneously, there has been a marked rise of design in organizations, and the roles and official spheres of influence of designers is shifting. Although studied since the 1960s, design cognition research has depended largely on data from design stud...

This research paper describes the results of a study exploring how user backgrounds can systematically be considered in design activities and how this can be used to enhance engineering design courses. In human-centered engineering design, understanding what users desire and need is key for creating innovative solutions [1]. Uncovering insights of...

While there is increasing interest in design, isolating its effects in compound results is challenging. Indeed, several studies point to practitioners struggling in finding appropriate metrics for their needs. We review extant design, service design and design thinking literature, mapping metrics to the different levels of design utilization in org...

As our world is getting evermore interconnected and entwined across professional, organizational and national boundaries, challenges rarely fall neatly into the realm of single functions, departments or disciplines any more. While it is uncertain what the world will look like in a few decades, and many of the needed skills and approaches are unknow...

*Making a series of small bets rather than one large gamble is at the core of experimentation, thereby scaling down what is at stake. *Less effortful and more speci c behaviors are more likely to be followed through, so making things tangible increases your odds of translating intentions into actions. *Small wins mark progress and offer proof-of-...

Most studies on design fixation have been conducted in experimental setups, with individuals ideating or sketching in response to relatively simple tasks. Fixation resulting from exposure to ideas and perceptions of others in a group situation has been less explored. This study investigated how an early exploration and ideation workshop in complex,...

Purpose The emerging perspectives of entrepreneurial ecosystems, bricolage and effectuation highlight the interaction between the entrepreneur and the surrounding community, and its potential for creative resource acquisition and utilization. However, empirical work on how this process actually unfolds remains scarce. This paper aims to study the i...

New ventures need to simultaneously develop both their first offering and the operations of the venture itself. This paper extends the notion of problem-solution co-evolvement from product design to venture design, presenting results from four new Finnish ventures in the midst of creating their first offering market-ready. Based on qualitative anal...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore managerial functions and related activities of inexperienced project managers in the front-end of the innovation (FEI) process. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 15 student project managers were interviewed while they were engaged in the front-end phase of their respective eight-month project...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the changes in managerial activities and challenges at different phases of innovative projects. Design/methodology/approach – Six NPD project managers were interviewed in three different project phases in a qualitative, longitudinal design. The resulting 18 semi-structured face-to-face interviews w...

Front-end of innovation is characterized by uncertainty, unpredictability, and changing needs. These unique features of the front-end phase of innovative projects require the project manager to cope with multiple, often conflicting and fluctuating, contingencies and to balance between different approaches and behaviors. However, traditionally, proj...

In universities, development as a teacher may be contradicted with developing as a researcher. Most previous studies have investigated pedagogical development merely as a result of pedagogical training and ignored the dual teacher-researcher identity. This study examines what kind of meaningful experiences are perceived to have triggered and influe...

Purpose – Innovations lie at the heart of both entrepreneurship and marketing. While research has long focused on the idea generation phase at the beginning of the innovation process, ideas need to subsequently be realized through efforts in idea development and implementation. This paper aims to study the antecedents and practices of idea advancem...

The paper presents a Sino-Finnish teaching initiative, including the design and experiences of a series of pedagogical workshops implemented at the Aalto-Tongji Design Factory (DF), Shanghai, China, and the experimentation plans collected from the 54 attending professors and teachers. The workshops aimed to encourage trying out interdisciplinary ha...

Defining and structuring wicked design problems has a major influence on subsequent problem solving, and demands a considerable level of skill. Previous research on mental representations in design is scarce, and has been largely based on students or individual experts. This study explored the differences in the initial mental representations of re...

This paper investigates the emerging leadership styles and managerial activities as well as challenges along the innovation process, based on a longitudinal, multiple case study. Largest amount of the activities were reported in the front-end phase whereas the majority of the challenges were reported in the late-development phase. Further, the stud...

This paper investigates the management activities of the project managers of six new product development projects based on a longitudinal, interview-based study. The study compared how the managerial activities of managers with a technical background differed from those with a nontechnical background, and how these activities evolved throughout the...

We argue that empirical research on creativity in design is detached from the realities of the design profession and therefore unable to contribute much to the development of the discipline. We believe that by taking an industry needs-centered approach to research and starting by understanding design practices we can find better and more fruitful r...

This paper investigates the leadership practices during the first two phases of the innovation process, the front end (front end of innovation, FEI) and the development (new product development, NPD) phases. The study was conducted in three Finnish companies of different sizes and industrial fields. In total, seven semi-structured interviews were c...

New ideas are the primary building blocks in attempts to produce novel interactive technology. Numerous idea generation methods such as Brainstorming have been introduced to support this process, but there is mixed evidence regarding their effectiveness. In this paper we describe an experimental, quantitative methodology from the domain of product...

Design thinking is described as a combination of thinking and acting that leads to new solution possibilities for design problems. Though traditionally linked to the design of objects and services, it can be applied to organizational processes as well. This paper examines design thinking in developing a new business, focusing on the business concep...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore critical success factors in knowledge‐intensive creative project work, using product development as an example field. Design/methodology/approach Critical‐incident based in‐depth interviews of 11 product development experts (chosen based on their recommendations and length of experience) were carried...

The shift to knowledge economies and the boom of knowledge-intensive organizations with their expert employees pose new challenges for leadership and management of development work. What is the appropriate amount and form of managerial control that is needed in knowledge-intensive development work? This paper focuses on illuminating the kind of lea...

It is generally believed that time pressure can hamper creative work. For design researchers, this belief is only one of the many time related claims that are short of any solid scientific basis. During previous years, design research has witnessed the birth of a new offspring, design idea generation research. This has lead to a range of systematic...

Organizations and educators alike are increasingly aiming for lifelong learning, and there are endless amounts of different courses, modules and degrees offered. Supplementary education has a special role in the lifelong learning spirit, but are these programs achieving the ultimate goal – changes in thought and behavior? Although the importance of...

Working life is increasingly characterized by teamwork and projects. The modern engineer often deals with such complex problems that a broader set of skills is needed than what any one individual can possess. As a result, work is done together with a diverse group of people from different educational, professional, and even cultural backgrounds. Me...

Conventional idea generation tools are often lacking in flexibility and in ease of communicating and critically evaluating the ideas. The amount of available techniques is abundant, but they are often complicated to apply. We have aimed to address the problems reported by the industry with a new method for effective idea generation and evaluation,...

Innovation has become the hot topic of today's working life, yet it is still unclear how education would best support this skill. What should we be developing? Much can be learnt comparing adaptive experts' problem solving behavior to that of non-experts. Based on a literature review and in-depth interviews of product development experts, whose job...

Building quick prototypes is a skill not often encountered in higher education. In this practice paper, based on experience in multi-disciplinary university projects, we propose that the creation of the first prototype is an important point in the project. We discuss some benefits of prototyping and recommend that prototyping is encouraged even in...

In the past, intuition has been the subject of a very limited amount of research. However, lately it has gained attention in both scholarly and more popular literature (e.g. [23, 30, 20, 32, 37, 31, 11]). We review the existing literature and develop the notion of intuition as a mechanism for purposeful resource allocation, based on the implicit pr...