design thinkers think like managers

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What kind of intimacy is meaningful to you? How intimate interactions foster individuals' sensemaking of innovation

This study examines how intimacy affects individuals' sensemaking of innovation in their organization. Although sensemaking facilitates understanding innovation and envisioning new worldviews, it involves a delicate process of self-disclosure, reflection, personal contact and communication. Intimacy focuses on time-bounded interactions that foster individuals' progressive self-disclosure and perceptions of mutual understanding. Therefore, drawing on intimacy theories, we investigate from a microlevel perspective how temporally bounded intimate interactions foster the meaningfulness of innovation for individuals. As sensemaking processes differ in large-scale radical and incremental innovations, we examine both contexts in a post hoc analysis. Through a field study, we show that different intimacy dynamics (emotional, cognitive and listening) influence meaningfulness perceptions. In particular, we find that the emotional intimacy dynamics positively influence meaningfulness perceptions in the context of radical innovation initiatives, while the cognitive and listening intimacy dynamics positively influence meaningfulness perceptions in the context of incremental innovation initiatives. This study contributes to the sensemaking innovation literature by introducing intimacy as an enabler of sensemaking. Our study also suggests that managers should encourage moments of intimate interaction when pursuing innovation to facilitate sensemaking of change

Innovation and Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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The European Innovation Council: Strategic Reflections

This second section reflects and discusses the establishment of a possible European Innovation Council (EIC) with as central aim the strengthening of European innovation policy while at the same time promoting a more open culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across Europe. The idea is to consider the EIC as an instrument to bring innovation policy in Europe in line with the characteristics of today’s open and collaborative innovation as discussed before, providing at the same time an impulse to innovative renewal at all levels of society. The success of the EIC would manifest itself in the long-term by evidence that its initiatives have created an innovation-friendly environment and new policy instruments, which significantly facilitated the growth of high-potential ‘scale-up’ firms by helping them access large markets, talent, funding and strategic decision makers. The core innovation principle of today “scale-up or fail fast” needs different policy tools than those designed in the past. The creation of complementarities and synergies, adaptations and adjustments motivating and pulling in new stakeholders across a number of existing institutions, policy instruments, constituencies would be central to the EIC. The EIC would focus on a few strategic elements, notably building synergies between different EU level instruments for innovation to maximize their added value on the European level, promoting the focus on people, openness and iterative results, and moving towards a new narrative around innovation and innovators

The design thinking approaches of three different groups of designers based on self-reports

This paper compares the design thinking approaches of three groups of student-designers: industrial design and architecture undergraduates, and design PhD candidates. Participants responded to an open-ended design brief, working individually. Upon submission of their designs they were debriefed about their design processes. We compare the groups based on their submissions and self-reported design activities, especially the sequence of their design activities and the time allotted to them. There were some commonalities and differences between the two undergraduate groups but the main differences were between the two undergraduates and the PhD students. On the basis of the findings we pose questions regarding design methods in the era of 'design thinking' wherein designers are required to adopt an entrepreneurial frame of mind