The Shaping of Form: Exploring Designers’ Use of Aesthetic Knowledge

Research on design and designers has emphasized the tacit nature of the aesthetic knowledge that these professionals draw upon to make decisions about formal properties of objects and spaces, but is less clear about how design teams address the difficulties associated with expressing and sharing this type of knowledge. A ten-month ethnography in a design consultancy revealed a range of multimodal and cross-modal ways in which members of a design team compensate their imperfect capacity of articulating verbally their aesthetic knowledge in order to gradually construct a common knowledge base enabling creative collaboration. In so doing, our study offers two main contributions. It illuminates the interplay between designers’ aesthetic experiences, visceral responses, and intuitive cognitive processes that enable designers to draw upon their aesthetic knowledge to support the collective accomplishment of their task, and provides an interpretation of the design process as a form of ‘creative’ intuition driven by emotional reactions to environmental stimuli and emerging formal solutions

Entrepreneurship and growth

The entrepreneurial growth literature is extensive, but research focusing on questions such as how firms grow, why they grow according to different patterns, how the decisions about growing or not growing are made, and the contextual dimensions within which growth takes place, has been neglected. This annual review article explores such issues: it suggests that there is a greater need to understand the processes that underlie entrepreneurial growth. In particular, we need to know more about how the entrepreneur's cognitive processes shape growth (i.e. microfoundations of growth), how they access and configure resources to achieve growth (i.e. the resource orchestration underpinning growth), whether these are influenced by a wider variety of contextual dimensions than previously recognised, and how these influence different patterns and types of growth

ORGANIZING THOUGHTS AND CONNECTING BRAINS: MATERIAL PRACTICES AND THE TRANSITION FROM INDIVIDUAL TO GROUP-LEVEL PROSPECTIVE SENSEMAKING

A growing body of research is drawing attention to the material practices that support verbal exchanges and cognitive processes in collective sensemaking. In this paper, building on an ethnographic study of a design consulting firm, we develop a process model that accounts for the interplay between conversational and material practices in the transition from individual to group level sensemaking, and we begin to unpack how the “materialization” of cognitive work supports the collective construction of new shared understandings

Academy of Management annual meeting proceedings

The death of a central figure, like a charismatic founder, can dilute the sense of collective identity among the various stakeholders of a local community. Maintenance of collective identity can be a difficult task, because the organization needs to then simultaneously deal with multiple identity drifts. We conducted an inductive study of Finnish company Ponsse, the founder recently passed away. The second-generation chairman took the lead to articulate the values that implicitly prevailed during the leadership of the founder. Our findings show that organizations that experience a loss can maintain and strengthen their collective identity after the passing of a charismatic leader by engaging in material identity work. Our study highlights two phases underlying the process of reinforcing the collective identity: creating the material environment and enacting material experiences. We contribute to deepen current understanding of how collective identities can be reinforced after a major loss by illuminating the material underpinnings of identity work." </p

Academy of Management annual meeting proceedings

The death of a central figure, like a charismatic founder, can dilute the sense of collective identity among the various stakeholders of a local community. Maintenance of collective identity can be a difficult task, because the organization needs to then simultaneously deal with multiple identity drifts. We conducted an inductive study of Finnish company Ponsse, the founder recently passed away. The second-generation chairman took the lead to articulate the values that implicitly prevailed during the leadership of the founder. Our findings show that organizations that experience a loss can maintain and strengthen their collective identity after the passing of a charismatic leader by engaging in material identity work. Our study highlights two phases underlying the process of reinforcing the collective identity: creating the material environment and enacting material experiences. We contribute to deepen current understanding of how collective identities can be reinforced after a major loss by illuminating the material underpinnings of identity work." </p

Framing the multifaceted nature of design thinking in addressing different innovation purposes

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.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Marketing and Consumer Researc

History, material memory and the temporality of identity construction

A growing body of research on how organizations engage with their histories has shown that organizational members revisit history in the light of present-day concerns to inspire or legitimate future courses of action. Studies of the processes through which organizational history is brought to bear on the present and future, however, remain rare. To uncover the processes and practices through which organizational members systematically engage with history, we investigated the uses of four corporate museums established by Italian manufacturers of consumer goods Alessi, Alfa Romeo, Ducati and Piaggio. We identified three distinct forms of engagement, reflecting different perspectives on the relationship between history and identity, involved different cognitive processes and emotional responses, and influenced organizational action in different ways. Our theoretical insights have significant implications not only for understanding the use of history in organizations, but also for research on organizational identity and organizational memory