The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Design Thinking practice: Insights from the Ecosystem of Startups

Design Thinking (DT) is spreading out in the managerial community as an alternative way to innovate products and services respect to the classical stage-gate model mostly linked to technology-push innovative patterns. At the same time few disruptive technologies – like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning – are impacting the ways companies manage their knowledge and activate innovation and design processes. What is the impact that AI is exerting on DT practices? What are the main changes that DT is undergoing? These questions are analyzed in this paper, where the aim consists in increasing the understanding of the transformation that is occurring in DT and more general in innovation practices. Through a qualitative case study analysis made on startups offering AI based solutions supporting multiple or individual DT phases, the article pinpoints few main changes: i) a facilitation in blending the right mix of cultures and creative attitudes in innovation teams; ii) the empowerment of the research phase where statistical significance is gained and user analysis are less observer-biased; iii) the automatization of the prototyping and learning phases

The contributions of interpreters to the development of radical innovations of meanings: the role of “pioneering projects” in the sustainable buildings industry

Studies of innovation management have often focused on two domains: technologies and markets. An ever-increasing standard of living is pushing companies to develop products and services that are not only profitable but also socially responsible. Sustainable housing offers an intriguing empirical setting that allows the investigation of new processes able to support innovations that must be both profitable and socially responsible. Energy-efficient houses not only require technological changes (new sustainable energy technologies) but also require behavioural changes in consumers’ attitudes, decisions and practices about living in sustainable houses. Companies are not only innovative in regard to their own product, but apply the entire system of application with which their specific technologies interact. The development of Pioneering Projects requires many skills and competencies that often exceed the capacity and competencies of a single company. In other words, Pioneering Projects are testing grounds for experimentation, where unconventional, temporary partnerships of stakeholders from different industries unite in the development of real market applications. The paper addresses the value of key interpreters in facilitating the development of radical innovations of meanings in the sustainable buildings industry. Specifically, the paper analyses the ability to create value for the Pioneering Projects from the exploration and knowledge diversity of the interpreters and the impact that Pioneering Projects have on the companies’ outcomes. Empirical data about Pioneering Projects were collected from two manufacturing companies in Denmark: DOVISTA and Saint-Gobain Isover

Exploring the Contribution of Innovation Intermediaries to the New Product Development (NPD) Process: a Typology and an Empirical Study

In the "knowledge economy" upheld by the European Lisbon strategy, knowledge-intensive services are considered a key driver for innovation and competitiveness. A category of knowledge-intensive services that has become of utmost importance in the last few decades is New Product Development (NPD) services, which interconnect distant knowledge domains with the client firms. In addition to NPD service providers, web-based innovation intermediaries have started to help innovative firms access dispersed bodies of knowledge. Despite the heterogeneity of their characteristics, however, a clear typology of the strategies used by traditional NPD service providers and web-based intermediaries to interact with their knowledge sources and with their clients is missing. This typology would be very useful for those firms that are willing to collaborate with innovation intermediaries because it could highlight the typologies of NPD problems different intermediaries are apt to address and the managerial challenges that working with them entails. Developing such a classification framework is the main goal of this paper. The typology proposed in this paper suggests that innovation intermediaries should be distinguished based on the following: (i) the way they Access their distributed knowledge sources and (ii) the way they Deliver value to their clients. By combining these two dimensions, 4 categories of innovation intermediaries are identified, which are named brokers, mediators, collectors and connectors. A multiple case study analysis involving 4 innovation intermediaries and 12 of their clients is presented in the paper. The analysis provides exploratory insights into (i) the typologies of NPD problems that each class of intermediaries addresses and (ii) the managerial challenges that working with each of them entails. These preliminary findings call for further theoretical and empirical research into the complex interaction among innovation intermediaries, their dispersed sources of knowledge and their clients

Mastering technologies in design-driven innovations: how two Italian furniture companies make design a central part of their innovation process

Design is more and more viewed as an important strategic resource. However, even though there is a lot of talk about design, there are only a handful of companies that have truly mastered the design-driven approach to innovation. There is even less research that has tried to understand how these companies are able to successfully manage this approach. This paper aims to understand what it means to make design a central part of the business process, something able to add value to products and create new markets. More specifically, it focuses on the interplay between functional and semantic dimensions of a product. In-depth case studies about two leading Italian companies that operate in the furniture industry (Kartell and Luceplan) underline different interpretations of the role of technologies in radical innovations in product meanings. The empirical results highlight two main interpretations of the role of technologies in radical design-driven innovations: technologies as enablers of new product meanings, the importance of a supply network that allows to rapidly change product technologies and supports the experimentation of new ones