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 impact of integrating digital technologies into experimentation processes remains underexplored. This study addresses these gaps by analyzing data from 246 design thinking projects to examine how early and frequent experimentation influences innovation performance, specifically in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. It also examines how the use of digital technologies moderates these relationships. The results show that both early and frequent experimentation positively influence innovation effectiveness, while only early experimentation significantly improves innovation efficiency. Moreover, the use of digital technologies strengthens the positive effects of early experimentation on both effectiveness and efficiency. This research provides valuable theoretical and practical insights by deepening our understanding of how experimentation and digital tools drive innovation performance in design thinking projects.@en

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.@en

This research investigates how professional designers engage with sustainability in their practices, focusing on the early ideation phase. A comprehensive literature review identified gaps in existing tools and methods, highlighting a lack of practical guidance for addressing sustainability within organisational and societal contexts. Semi-structured interviews with design practitioners provided insights into the challenges designers face, including conflicting stakeholder priorities, greenwashing, and the need for alignment across diverse perspectives. A co-creation session further refined these insights, leading to the development of the Tactical Sustainability Cards—a tool designed to inspire sustainable thinking, guide decision-making, and foster collaboration. The Tactical Sustainability Cards were validated through expert feedback and iterative refinement, emphasising their utility in overcoming limitations of existing Design for Sustainability (DfS) tools, such as complexity and narrow focus. By providing actionable prompts and a shared language, the cards empower designers to navigate sustainability challenges, align stakeholders, and justify sustainable initiatives effectively. This research contributes to bridging the gap between sustainability theory and practice by offering a practical tool that integrates sustainability into design processes. The findings lay a foundation for future work exploring the broader applicability of the cards and elaborate on the potential for design to harmonise innovation and sustainability, addressing the environmental and societal challenges.

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Inspiration is vital for designers. This study builds on findings on inspiration examples for problem-solving tasks and extends those to styling tasks by exploring the influence of examples on styling criteria. The generation of inspiration examples in this study is grounded in design literature and practice. This study identifies primary styling criteria (i.e., personality coherence, visual coherence, and originality) to evaluate the design outcome. The results indicate that designers who received near-field examples that communicated an intended meaning compared to designers who did not receive any examples generated concepts with a higher personality coherence yet with a similar level of originality. Also, near-field visual examples increased visual coherence. Thus, different design criteria need specific examples.@en

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.

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Organizational transitions can evoke a range of reactions and emotions among employees, departments, stakeholders, and leaders. To effectively manage the transition, it is crucial to comprehend how organizations experience and design change to navigate the various challenges of the transition process. This study investigates how changes in the working environment of the catering staff of a convention centre in the Netherlands led to the formation of a close-knit community that not only embraced the change but also developed innovative approaches for addressing local and social challenges. We draw on interviews with 16 individuals from the organization and use social practice theory to show the interconnected elements of practices that collectively constitute a creative approach to change. The study reveals that leadership and support are crucial competencies for promoting the participation and engagement needed to turn a crisis into an opportunity for both the organization and its stakeholders.@en

The circular economy aims to decouple economic growth from negative environmental impacts. To achieve this goal, circular economy concepts and policies must be implemented in practice by organizations through new circular business models. However, organizations often fail to implement circular business models on the market at scale. This is a major problem in business innovation practice, while a knowledge gap about the underlying implementation challenges remains in the scientific literature. More research on the subject is needed. The objective of this study is contributing to shed light into the gap with empirical insights. Using an action research method within an EU innovation project, this article proposes a preliminary empirical framework that links the value proposition, creation, delivery, and capture dimensions of a circular business models with specific cultural, regulatory, economic, and technical barriers that might hinder implementation. Based on the framework, four lessons to support managerial action are provided. Future research might build upon this work by systematically collecting and structuring more granular empirical data about the specific reasons why new circular business models fail to be implemented by organizations, across different sectors and geographical areas.

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Little is known about how design leaders foster design excellence “at scale” within large organizations. To bridge this gap, this article reports on interviews with 59 senior design leaders. Using a paradox perspective to frame the findings uncovers major challenges when leading design teams inside large organizations. It also identifies five pairs of opposing leadership behaviors that address these tensions and balance the overarching paradox of integrating design into the fabric of an organization while maintaining its distinctive character: being transformative yet affirmative; being directive yet accommodating; being proactive yet responsive; being intuitive yet systematic; and being holistic yet specific.

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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, strategic transformation, organizational and cultural change. Is it reasonable to assume that the same set of practices fits such a broad range of applications equally well? This study addresses how design thinking applications are differently framed when addressing diverse innovation purposes. Specifically, we compare two purposes: innovation of solutions, encompassing traditional product and service development projects, and innovation of direction, encompassing strategic and organizational renewal projects. Based on data collected from 146 design thinking projects conducted by European consulting firms we investigate the relationships between the design thinking practices adopted and the value generated by the projects. We then analyze how these relationships vary depending on the purpose of the innovation project, namely whether focused on innovating solutions or direction. The results show that different purposes indeed call for different practices. In projects aimed at innovating solutions, market value is positively related to capturing current user needs and envisioning future society. Conversely, in projects aimed at innovating direction, market value is positively related to challenging current assumptions.

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The intensification of industrial activity within an unsustainable development paradigm caused an alarming environmental crisis intertwined with societal problems on a global scale. Sustainable design theory contains an extensive body of knowledge on how these environmental and societal issues can be addressed by rethinking industrial products, processes and, more broadly, how organizations operate in the context of a more sustainable socio-economic system. Nevertheless, evidence shows that implementing these ideas is a problematic yet under addressed aspect, resulting in a gap between abstract speculations and concrete action. In this study, we focus on this critical gap by looking at how existing theory of sustainable design is implemented in business practice. To this end, we conduct a literature review followed by interviews with twenty international experts, to uncover their knowledge related to relevant project experiences. The outcome is a framework that integrates existing sustainable design theory with important business concepts, clustering it into four literature streams:ecodesign, product service system design, sustainable business model design and collaborative ecosystem design. These streams correspond to four levels of design for sustainable innovation. The framework also encompasses a set of themes related to the implementation of sustainable design theory in business practice across the aforementioned four levels. Based on this, we outline our contributions to theory and practice, and pinpoint recommendations for academic researchers, industrial designers and business managers who want to leverage their professional position to play an active role in the transition toward sustainable development.

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Next to the redesign of industrial products and processes, sustainable business model innovation is a strategic approach to integrate environmental and social concerns into the objectives and operations of organizations. One of the major challenges of this approach is that many promising business model ideas fail to reach the market, which is needed to achieve impact. In the literature, the issue is referred to as a “design-implementation gap.” This paper explores how that critical gap may be bridged. In doing so, we contribute to sustainable business model innovation theory and practice. We contribute to theory by connecting sustainable business model innovation with business experimentation and strategic design, two innovation approaches that leverage prototyping as a way to iteratively implement business ideas early on. Using a design science research methodology, we combine theoretical insights from these three literatures into a tool for setting up small-scale pilots of sustainable business models. We apply, evaluate, and improve our tool through a rigorous process by working with nine startups and one multinational company. As a result, we provide normative theory in terms of the sustainable business model innovation process, explaining that piloting a prototype forces organizations to simultaneously consider the desirability (i.e., what users want), feasibility (i.e., what is technically achievable), viability (i.e., what is financially possible), and sustainability (i.e., what is economically, socially and environmentally acceptable) of a new business model. Doing so early on is functional to bridge the design-implementation gap of sustainable business models. We contribute to practice with the tool itself, which organizations can use to translate sustainable business model ideas defined “on paper” into small-scale pilots as a first implementation step. We encourage future research building on the limitations of this exploratory study by working with a larger sample of companies through longitudinal case studies, to further explain how these pilots can be executed successfully.

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Design for Sustainable Development refers to the application of a design process to solve a problem related to sustainability, such as creating a pair of shoes that can be recycled or managing waste collection in a large city. Since the origins of this concept in the 1960s, Design for Sustainable Development has been evolving, gradually broadening its scope over time from the design of products to the design of services, business models and wider ecosystems. In this evolution, designers have come closer and closer to business problems, thus becoming more strategic. In this paper, we explore this evolution from a business perspective. We visualize it into a framework and interview eight academic experts about the Strategic role of Designers for Sustainable Development. We find that the evolution can be framed around five topics: the strategic goal of designers, and their related perspective, language, key activities and main challenge. After discussing how the evolution took place around each topic, we draw implications for designers and managers who are willing to play an active role in the transition towards sustainable development.@en

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Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is a collective approach to competitive advantage in which separate industries create a cooperative network to exchange materials, energy, water and/or by-products. By addressing issues related to resource depletion, waste management and pollution, IS plays an important role in the transition towards sustainable development. In the literature, two conceptual perspectives on IS can be identified: the Industrial Ecology (IE) and the Circular Economy (CE) perspective. Despite the recognition of these two perspectives, their relationship remains unclear and explicit attempts to develop an integrated perspective have not been made yet. Consequently, the goal of this research is to highlight and start addressing this critical gap of knowledge in order to support future research and practice geared towards the design of new IS clusters. We pose the following research question: How can the IE and CE perspectives on IS be combined in order to support the design of IS clusters? To this end, we first investigate the two perspectives more in depth and compare them in terms of nature, features and relevance for the study of IS. This is done by applying them as conceptual lenses for the analysis of the same case study, an existing IS cluster. The comparative analysis provides insights into how the two perspectives differ, ultimately demonstrating that they are complimentary and both necessary to fully describe an IS cluster. While the CE perspective is more suitable to explain how a cluster functions from a business standpoint in the operating phase, the IE perspective is more suitable to explain its development over time and its impacts on the environment, the economy and society. Building upon the outcomes of the comparative analysis, we leverage on the discipline of Strategic Design and integrate the two perspectives into a process for designing new IS clusters. We suggest two directions for future research. First, improving our comparative analysis of the two perspectives by looking at a wider sample of IS clusters of different sizes and in different contexts. Second, focusing with more specificity on the issue of how IS clusters can be designed, potentially by trying to apply the process we propose on a real case aimed at designing a new IS cluster.

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Digital innovations in-store are often unnecessary, unintuitive and uncomfortable and mostly make use of personal data for one-way messaging instead of meaningful interpersonal interactions. Digital initiatives are also more focused on enhancing the shopping experience (even unsuccessfully) instead of building consumer-brand relationship through an emotional brand experience. This paper introduces a new design framework which envisions a way of using personal consumer data for the design and development of in-store digital brand touch points. The aim of the framework is to improve consumers’ in -store digital experience and their emotional connections with the brand. The foundational model for our framework is the Design for Emotion model developed by Pieter Desmet (2002). The model is used in a retail and branding context, and adapted to leverage the opportunities of personal consumer data in personalization strategies. @en

In this chapter, we explore a methodology for ‘process as withness’ (Fachin & Langley 2018) to study the experience of ‘living forward’ and creating ‘narratives of prospect’ (Weick 1999). We build on the work of Shotter (2006, 2009) on Withness and operationalize it through the pragmatic concept of inquiry (Farjoun, Ansell & Boin, 2015; Martela, 2015). For this, we propose to build on the existing links between withness and pragmatism through the work of James, Dewey, and Mead, but extending these to incorporate withness in pragmatic inquiry. Withness up until now had remained philosophical and theoretical with few vignettes of dialogical interaction by Shotter (2006; 2009). We operationalize withness through embedding it within pragmatic inquiry. Through this, we operationalize withness as a methodology by building on the collective inquiry process of pragmatism that takes withness beyond individual situations, but proceeds through a whole process of inquiry. We illustrate our proposed methodology through an example of interacting with a colleague facing a situation where she temporarily did not know how to go on. We show how dialogical interaction leads to a novel concept as a metaphor to describe a new idea that emerged and was visualized. In this chapter we reflect on our experience. Withness is promising for understanding the struggles of living forward of practitioners and researchers alike, especially during long-term studies that allow continuous engagement with a community of inquiry. We end with a call for action for other researchers to learn from our attempts, to criticize them and to build on them. The main challenges are the dialogical nature of withness, finding research participants in doubtful situations, and keeping the prospective nature alive when communicating ‘process as withness’ research.@en

The rapid evolution of information and communications technologies (ICT) has changed the way in which companies innovate and generate value for their customers. As a key function within innovation, design has also evolved in order to better support companies in dealing with the pace and complexity of technological, economic and societal change. Particularly, while design core principles of human centredness, collaboration and use of prototypes has remained the same over time, the way in which they are put into practice has adapted to the innovation challenges of the time. In this article, we describe how design practices related to human centredness, collaborativeness and prototyping are (and have been) executed across three eras: the industrial era, the service era and the digital era. Based on such evolution and on the current strengths of design, we explore complementarities and possible synergies with the marketing function to enable companies to succeed in innovating in the digital era.

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An increasing number of companies are embracing the transition from a product focus to a service focus in their offering in order to face the challenges of the experience economy. However such transition (i.e., servitization) is challenging, since it requires companies to change both their processes and their mindset. In this paper we propose service design practices as an effective approach for overcoming the challenges of servitization and for achieving such a multi-layered transformation. By means of expert interviews, ethnography and multiple case studies, we empirically show how service design professionals guide companies towards a sustainable adoption of service orientation and successful implementation of service innovations. Specifically, we describe and exemplify a set of practices through which service design professionals establish a service-oriented mindset, introduce a service-specific development process, and a create widespread commitment to the servitization transition.@en

Brand experience is an important concept in marketing because it can affect brand loyalty, brand recall, and brand attitude. Brand experience design is therefore an important practice for companies to create favourable and meaningful experiences, through the design of various touchpoints that are in line with the brand values. This paper presents a multiple-case study of brand experience design in practice. Our results suggest similarities and differences between product design and brand experience design processes. Furthermore, we suggest that reciprocal influences may exist between the brand and touchpoint design. We also provide insights for managers and designers to not only use logical reasoning but also other capabilities to design for brand experiences. Finally, we identified the limitations of our study and interesting areas for future research.@en