Strategy discourse as collaborative design practice: Can design thinking benefit strategy development?

This paper provides an investigation into strategic processes, focusing on identifying the processes, practices and capabilities characterising intra- and inter-organisational collaboration that foster strategy development and innovation through creativity in thinking and problem solving. To do so we build our research framework at the intersection of four theoretical foundations: integrative design practice (or design thinking), inter-organizational collaboration, dynamic capabilities and practice theory

Designing the future: strategy, design and the 4th Revolution: an introduction

This is an introduction to the special issue of California Management Review on Design Thinking (DT). This special issue joins the growing body of work exploring the idea of DT and whether DT makes a difference in terms enhancing or augmenting the impact of technology—and, as a result, innovation—in a positive way. We have chosen an interesting, relevant, and useful array of papers that provide different approaches, views, and interpretations of applied design thinking. These articles provide both management and scholarly readers with insights in how DT is used, as well as its impact and usefulness in a variety of contexts

Organizational creativity as idea work: Intertextual placing and legitimating imaginings in media development and oil exploration

How do we understand the nature of organizational creativity when dealing with complex, composite ideas rather than singular ones? In response to this question, we problematize assumptions of the linearity of creative processes and the singularity of ideas in mainstream creativity theory. We draw on the work of Bakhtin and longitudinal research in two contrasting cases: developing hydrocarbon prospects and concepts for films and TV series. From these two cases, we highlight two forms of work on ideas: (i) intertextual placing, whereby focal ideas are constituted by being connected to other elements in a larger idea field; and (ii) legitimating imaginings, where ideas of what to do are linked to ideas of what is worth doing and becoming. This ongoing constitution and legitimating is not confined to particular stages but takes place in practices of generating, connecting, communicating, evaluating and reshaping ideas, which we call idea work. The article contributes to a better understanding of the processual character of creativity and the deeply intertextual nature of ideas, including the multiplicity of idea content and shifting parts–whole relationships. Idea work also serves to explore the neglected role of co-optative power in creativity

Innovating the Practice of Normative Control in Project Management Contractual Relations

© Oxford University Press 2011. All rights reserved. This artivcle begins by considering the institution of contract and approaches to it. It follows this with an analysis of an institutional innovation, the development of alliancing as a specific form of contract premised on a far more normative mode of control than the disciplinary mechanisms of surveillance which have traditionally been seen as more typically associated with conventional contracts. A new way of managing projects is evolving, which is reported in this article. The article also considers some of its advantages as well as some of its disadvantages