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Designing Entrepreneurship. Creating Enterprise Through Design Culture
Abstract and Figures
Entrepreneurship has gained a lot of attention in recent times, in which the economic crises has reflected severely in massive unemployment – particularly among young people in Southern Europe. It has become the focus of attention of governments and private sector alike particularly because it has been positively correlated to job creation. Today, many young graduates, including designers, find themselves without many opportunities of formal employment since traditionally this meant working either for a large company as an in-house designer or as an external consultant. Today, the offer of design graduates largely exceeds demand by these traditional employers.
Because of this, the relationship between design and entrepreneurship has become the focus of many studies and many universities have started to encourage design students to become entrepreneurs. However, the relationship between design and entrepreneurship is mostly approached and understood as either designers who design and produce their own products or sell professional design services. Thus, in this perspective design is confined to the shaping of the business offering.
In the last decade, the idea that design can be focused not only on physical products but also on intangible artefacts such as signs, interactions, processes, and services represented the first important development of the concept. Starting from this idea, during the 2000s a considerable expansion of its scope took place, particularly the idea that design, and more specifically design thinking, could be applied to managerial problems and fit the unpredictability of current markets to address ill-defined problems adopting a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach. Therefore, the idea that design could shape business strategy became mainstream. However, this work postulates that design can influence an even earlier phase of the business process.
A central construct and fundamental pillar of business ventures is the entrepreneurial opportunity. Although it has been widely acknowledged that the discovery (or creation) of entrepreneurial opportunities is a crucial starting point of the entrepreneurial process, reliable and replicable methods for systematically searching, framing, developing and assessing opportunities are still undeveloped. Consequently, entrepreneurs waste their limited resources (talent and time) in inefficient activities aiming at developing new business ventures.
Identifying entrepreneurial opportunities and transforming them into successful ventures is particularly relevant in the current economic recession, especially in southern European countries where unemployment rates are particularly high and entrepreneurship has the potential to boost employment. Thus aspiring entrepreneurs need more than ever reliable framing techniques because they need to be more assertive of their options and choices, avoiding wasting valuable resources in the opportunity identification phase.
While the front end of entrepreneurial and new product development process have many similarities, such as the “open-endess” of modeling multiple options, supporting tools and techniques for framing and assessing ideas are seldom shared by these two processes. This work explored the applicability of design expertise from the process of developing new products in the early stages of the entrepreneurial process, more specifically in the business identification phase.
While some authors already elaborated on the importance of systematizing the creative process and applying creative methods and techniques to the opportunity generation process, none of them acknowledges any potential contribution from design, which for most scholars still remains a practice difficult to observe, measure and analyze.
The hypothesis of this work is that the design discipline possesses tools, methodologies, frameworks and a “designerly mindset” that makes the creation, framing, positioning, development and assessment of business ideas more reliable and efficient when exploring entrepreneurial opportunities. These toolsets could be transferred from the field of design to that of business to support the construction of new entrepreneurial ventures. The word “construction” is used since some of these tools are a step ahead of prefiguring: they are not just meant to design, but to dialogue, convince, construct, assess, and build a working prototype. Service design tools were chosen because they enable the framing, design, prototyping and assessment of complex intangible artifacts that require developing networks of actors and partners that support execution.
One of the main objectives of this study was to identify design strategies, tools or methodologies that could enable framing, structuring, assessing, developing and evaluating business ideas in the earliest stages of the front-end of innovation (FEI) of the entrepreneurial process, analogously to how its done in new product development processes.
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... The overlap is described both in terms of the theory and practice (e.g. Mata Garciá, 2014;Shah & Tripsas, 2007) and educational approach (e.g. Garbuio, Dong, Lin, Tschang, & Lovallo, 2017;Katz, 2003;Neck & Greene, 2011). ...
The conference general theme Research Perspectives on Creative Intersections captured the overall conference spirit. It also reflects the conference planning and organisational processes which involved the community of international scholars located in different institutions, faculties, schools and departments.
The interdisciplinary nature of the conference enabled active intersections of scholars from the fields of design, social sciences and business studies. The mingling of researchers from diverse disciplines reflects the need for interdisciplinary approaches to research complex issues related to innovation.
The intersection between emerging and established researchers was an intended aspect of the conference. The reason was that today’s PhD candidates will drive the future research. The conference succeeded by attracting significant number of PhD candidates who represented a third of the conference delegates. This provides a good indication for the future growth research related to design innovation.
Altogether, 295 authors have submitted: 140 full papers and 31 workshop proposals. These numbers indicate that a single authored research is no longer the norm. The intersection which stems from collaboration amongst researchers to undertake and disseminate research is now becoming the established practice within the design innovation research.
The 19 conference tracks, for which the papers were submitted, were organised within 7 overarching themes (see Table 1). The track facilitators ultimately shaped the overall conference scope and direction. The tracks’ topics acted as the focal points for the overall Call for Papers. Thus, our thanks you go to all the 69 tracks’ facilitators. It was them who collectively were responsible for the conference programme and we would like to thank them for their valuable services on the International Scientific Programme Committee.
Table 1 Conference Tracks
Theme 1) New Models of Innovation
Track 1a. The Interplay between Science, Technology and Design
Track 1b. Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Trends in Open Innovation
Track 1c. FROM R&D TO D&R: Challenging the Design Innovation Landscape
Track 1d. Design creating value at intersections
Track 1e. Design management transforming innovation strategy
Theme 2) Product-Service Systems
Track 2a. Capturing Value and Scalability in Product-Service System Design
Track 2b. Service Design for Business Innovation for Industry 4.0
Theme 3) Policy Making
Track 3a. Creative Intersection of Policies and Design Management
Theme 4) Intersecting Perspective
Track 4a. Changing Design Practices: How We Design, What We Design, and Who Designs?
Track 4b. Challenges and Obstacles to the Enactment of an Outside-In Perspective: The Case of Design
Track 4c. At the Intersection Social Innovation and Philosophy
Theme 5) Methods
Track 5a. Design practices of effective strategic design
Track 5b. Markets and Design: Vertical and Horizontal Product Differentiation
Track 5c. Foresight by Design: Dealing with uncertainty in Design Innovation
Track 5d. Contemporary Brand Design
Theme 6) Capabilities
Track 6a. Building New Capabilities in an Organization: A research methodology perspective
Track 6b. Exploring Design Management Learning: Innovate with 'user' oriented design and KM perspectives
Track 6c. Design teams in the pursuit of innovation
Track 6d. Designing the Designers: Future of Design Education
Theme 7) Foundations
Track 7a. Pioneering Design Thinkers
We would like to also thank the over 150 expert reviewers who provided their valuable time to provide critical peer feedback. Their service on the International Board of Reviewers was invaluable as the good quality peer reviews provided a vital contribution to this international conference. Each reviewer scored papers on a scale of 0 to 10 and provided critical review comments.
Most papers were reviewed by two people, though some had three or even four reviewers, and in a very small number of cases only one review was submitted. Total number of submitted full papers was 140. After the blind peer review process 66 papers (47%) were accepted and 49 (35%) papers were provisionally accepted as these needed major revisions, and 25 (19%) papers were rejected.
In making the final decisions about papers, the Review Committee first looked at all papers where the difference of opinion between reviewers was 4 points or greater and moderated the scores if necessary. The Review Committee then discussed all papers that were just under the general level of acceptance to determine outcomes, before finally looking at any exceptions.
At the end of the review process 103 (73%) paper submissions were accepted for presentations of which 95 (68%) were included in the proceedings and 38 (27%) papers were rejected. Seven accepted papers were presented at the conference as research in progress and they were not included in the proceedings.
The workshops provided another intersection on how delegates and workshop facilitators interacted. Altogether, 31 workshop proposals were submitted and 17 (54%) workshops were accepted by the International Workshop Organising Committee. We would like to thank the International Workshop Organising Committee members: Katinka Bergema, Nuša Fain, Oriana Haselwanter, Sylvia Xihui Liu, Ida Telalbasic and Sharon Prendeville for providing their expertise.
We would like to thank both keynote speakers, Professor Jeanne Liedtka and Mr Richard Kelly, who generously gave their time to share their insights with the conference delegates. Their generosity allowed us to offer bursaries to five emerging researchers to attend the conference. The bursar recipients were selected from close to 40 applicants. The number of applicants indicates the need to setup funding schemes to allow emerging researchers to attend international events such as this conference.
The PhD Seminar event which took place a day prior to the conference was attended by over 100 delegates. The PhD Seminar was chaired by Dr Sylvia Xihui Liu and Professor Jun Cai. Initially 40 submissions were received of which 36 were presented at the event. The event culminated with a debate organised by the PhD students who were inspired by the “Open Letter to the Design Community: Stand Up for Democracy” by Manzini and Margolin (2017). We are grateful to the debate organisers.
The location of the conference in the Jockey Club Innovation Tower designed by Zaha Hadid at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University has also provided delegates with visible cultural intersections of a rapidly transitioning major interconnected global city from one political sphere of influence into another. The conference would not have happened without the solid work provided by the local organising team which was led by Professor Cees de Bont and consisted of: Ms Rennie Kan who took up the role of the fixer; Mr Pierre Tam who in his role as the Conference Secretary tirelessly worked on satisfying at many times conflicting requirement; Ms Flora Chang who checked and checked again all delegates registrations; Mr Rio Chan wizard of IT and Mr Jason Liu who provided the visual direction for the conference.
The Design Management Academy’s international research conference was organised under the auspices of the Design Society’s Design Management Special Interest Group (DeMSIG) and Design Research Society’s Design Innovation Management Special Interest Group (DIMSIG) in collaboration with: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Loughborough University, Tsinghua University, University of Strathclyde, Politecnico di Milano and Delft University of Technology. The conference was a culmination of two years of planning and the 2019 conference planning commenced well before the 2017 conference programme schedule was finalised. It is a hope that the conference will act as a platform to build a diverse community of scholars who are interested to explore and discuss design innovation practices.
Conference Proceedings of the Design Management Academy
2017 International Conference: Research Perspectives on Creative Intersections
7–9 June 2017, Hong Kong,
designmanagementacademy.com
Volume 4
Editors: Erik Bohemia, Cees de Bont and Lisbeth Svengren Holm
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Conference Proceedings of the Design Management Academy
ISSN 2514-8419 (Online)
Design Management Academy
ISBN 978-1-912294-11-4 (Volume 1)
ISBN 978-1-912294-12-1 (Volume 2)
ISBN 978-1-912294-13-8 (Volume 3)
ISBN 978-1-912294-14-5 (Volume 4)
ISBN 978-1-912294-15-2 (Volume 5)
Published as an imprint of the Design Research Society
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The Design Society is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, No: SC031694
In our daily practice of teaching and coaching students how to develop their business proposition for their high tech new ventures, we build on innovation and design sciences. In developing their business proposition, students engage in several activities simultaneously and also change their activities frequently. How can we, as educators, understand this process of always changing activities while being in the midst of coaching students? We investigate this process by analysing coaching conversations we have with students in our course Clean Tech Launchpad. Based on the theory of complex responsive processes of relating and the participatory innovation construct ‘quality of conversation’, this paper discusses how design as a social activity around the business proposition takes place in the interaction between coaches and students. Therefore, we introduce the term ‘Quality of Entrepreneurial Design Conversations’. This local creation of meaning helps to design the business proposition development process of students.
In this empirical paper we investigate the role of design theory during the early start-up phases of technology based new ventures. As a basis for this investigation we use empirical data gained in two round of semi-structured in depth interviews with 10 high tech start-ups. Based on the first round of interviews we reflect how new ventures go from a first opportunity towards a business model. In the second round of interviews we explore how new ventures evolve in the period after the creation of a business plan. As a result we describe how new ventures go though three phases in developing their business: exploration, realisation, and exploitation. Based on this model we explore how the process of new venture creation can be described in the light of problem solving theories as described in design literature.
Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as an important driver of innovation and economic development. The trend of design entrepreneurship has emerged globally and becoming a new career option for designers. It is observed that design enterprises are increasing in Taiwan. Since entrepreneurship is a vital driver of economic development, these design enterprises in Taiwan can serve as real cases to get insight of the approaches to design entrepreneurship. Hence, the method of case study was adopted. Ten design enterprises were selected as cases for the research. With value chain analysis, this study aims to investigate how design entrepreneurs integrate available resource and seize market opportunity to create value for their business. According to the results, three models of value-chain management were identified from this study: collaboration of design and production, alliance of design and distribution, and niche creativity. The findings are further discussed to provide a better understanding of the approaches to design entrepreneurship in Taiwan.
The chapter is an introduction to service design. It starts by introducing design thinking and how it recently became adapted by the specifics of service to become service design. It uses theory and practice to describe key terms, competences and approaches to explain what service design is, and how it is a means of designing for trust. © Marika Lüders, Tor W. Andreassen, Simon Clatworthy and Tore Hillestad 2017. All rights reserved.
The fast transformation of technologies into new products or processes is one of the core challenges for any technology-based enterprise. Within the innovation process, we believe, the early phases (fuzzy front end) to have the highest impact on the whole process and the result (Input-Output Process), since it will influence the design and total costs of the innovation extremely. However the Fuzzy Front End is unfortunately the least-well structured part of the innovation process, both in theory and in practice.
The focus of the present chapter is on methods and tools to manage the fuzzy front end of the innovation process. Firstly, the activities, characteristics, and challenges of the front end are described. Secondly, a framework of the application fields for different methods and tools is presented: Since a product upgrade requires a different approach compared to radical innovation, where the market is unknown and a new technology is applied, we believe such a framework to be useful for practitioners. Thirdly, a selection of methods and tools that can be applied to the fuzzy front end are presented and allocated within the framework. The methods selected here address process improvements, concept generation, and concept testing.
This paper presents an innovation pyramid that categorizes four different kinds of design-driven innovations in the product-design field. This pyramid is the final result of a long-term research process started at Politecnico di Milano in 2006 involving the three key disciplinary areas related to new product development: management, engineering and design. The disciplines were represented by the Indaco (Industrial Design, Art and COmunication) and Mechanical Engineering departments of the Politecnico di Milano, and the Business School of Bocconi University. The first step of the research project attempted to determine how to better demonstrate the contribution design makes to product innovation. In order to answer this, a phenomenological approach was used, i.e. observing product innovation as a phenomenon. From this approach, three possible levers of a design-driven innovation process emerged: form, mode of use, and technology. Additionally, four possible types of results of a design-driven process emerged: aesthetic, mode of use, meaning, and typological innovation. The levers and results are systematized here into an innovation pyramid, which helps to clarify both their similarities and their differences.
When an innovation is inspired by design, it transcends technology and utility. The design delights the user, seamlessly integrating the physical object, a service, and its use into something whole. A design-inspired innovation is so simple that it becomes an extension of the user. It creates meaning and a new language. Design-Inspired Innovation takes a unique look at the intersection between design and innovation, and explores the novel ways in which designers are contributing to the development of products and services. The book’s scope is international, with emphasis on design activities in Boston, England, Sweden, and Milan. Through a rich variety of cases and cultural prisms, the book extends the traditional design viewpoint and stretches the context of industrial design to question - and answer - what design is really all about. It gives readers tools for inspiration, and shows how design can change language and even create human possibilities. © 2006 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved.
Today we find ourselves in possession of stupendous know-how, which we willingly place in the hands of the most highly skilled people. But avoidable failures are common, and the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of our knowledge has exceeded our ability to consistently deliver it - correctly, safely or efficiently. In this groundbreaking book, Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument for the checklist, which he believes to be the most promising method available in surmounting failure. Whether you're following a recipe, investing millions of dollars in a company or building a skyscraper, the checklist is an essential tool in virtually every area of our lives, and Gawande explains how breaking down complex, high pressure tasks into small steps can radically improve everything from airline safety to heart surgery survival rates. Fascinating and enlightening, The Checklist Manifesto shows how the simplest of ideas could transform how we operate in almost any field.
'This ambitious book draws upon a wide variety of literature in developing a comprehensive theory of entrepreneurship, ranging from the discovery of entrepreneurial activities, to industry differences in entrepreneurial activity, to the organizing process. It represents a major contribution to the field.' - Arnold C. Cooper, Purdue University, US. 'Professor Scott Shane provides a deep and comprehensive discussion of the individual-opportunity nexus in entrepreneurship. Eschewing the usual approaches of either focusing exclusively on the individuals and their motivations and actions or focusing exclusively, almost always ex-post, on the economic potential of opportunities, Scott Shane fixes his gaze squarely on the nexus of the individual and the opportunity. It is this nexus that I believe is the building block for a better understanding of the entrepreneurial phenomenon.' - From the foreword by Sankaran Venkataraman. In the first exhaustive treatment of the field in 20 years, Scott Shane extends the analysis of entrepreneurship by offering an overarching conceptual framework that explains the different parts of the entrepreneurial process - the opportunities, the people who pursue them, the skills and strategies used to organize and exploit opportunities, and the environmental conditions favorable to them - in a coherent way.
To date, service prototyping has been discussed academically as an unproblematic add-on to existing prototyping techniques, or as methods for prototyping social interaction. In fact, most of the knowledge on how services are prototyped comes from organisations and practicing design consultants. Some attempts to define service prototyping have been made but generally without concern about how complete service experiences should or could be represented. Building on existing knowledge about prototyping, a draft of a service prototyping conceptualisation is generated. Based on the draft, the question of how to prototype holistic service experiences is raised and in total, 5 studies have been conducted that contribute knowledge to that overarching question. In addition, each study has its own research question. Study 1 conceptualises prototypes and prototyping in a framework while study 2 and 3 looks at what practicing service designers say they do to prototype services and how they involve different stakeholders in the process. Study 4 examines aspects of design communication and how service experiences are communicated and used during design meetings, and study 5 finally, attempts to generate a process that can be used to evaluate the impact of location oriented service prototypes in e.g. healthcare settings. A number of challenges for service prototyping are identified in the studies, along with the issue of who authors prototypes. The conceptualisation of prototyping is adjusted based on the studies and a framework is constructed that support the conceptualisation. Little evidence for holistic approaches to prototyping services is found in the interviews and service designers involve their clients primarily when prototyping. Service experiences are introduced in communication using a format termed micro-narratives. This format and the purpose of using references to previous experiences are discussed. The thesis is concluded with a suggestion of a process for service prototyping. This process is specific for service design and attempts to support service designers in making holistic service representations when prototyping. Service prototyping requires further research.