Prelims

Half Title Page

DESIGNING CREATIVE ORGANIZATIONS

Tools, Processes and Practice

Title Page

DESIGNING CREATIVE ORGANIZATIONS

Tools, Processes and Practice

BY

IGOR HAWRYSZKIEWYCZ

University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2017

Copyright © 2017 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78714-035-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-034-9 (Online)

Dedication

The book is dedicated to Matthew, Isabella, and Michael.

Acknowledgment

Special thanks are made to Nicholas Bramich for his careful reading of an early version of the text and many valuable contributions.

Preface

This book describes why and how organizations must become agile in the emerging complex world. Agility is increasingly needed to respond creatively to the often unexpected disruptions and opportunities in today’s emerging complex environment. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the characteristic of the complex environment and the impact of emerging technologies in driving continual change. The continual change poses challenges to design business models that address the continual change. The focus throughout the book is on such design, which is seen as taking an idea and converting it to practical use. Creativity plays a big role in design. Creativity is needed to respond to unexpected situations which in turn require thinking outside the box, a prime property of creative thinking. The outcome of the design process is a business model. A design culture where ideas originating throughout the enterprise are followed through in a systematic way to change the business model whenever seen advantageous.

The emphasis is on the design processes and ways designers’ use design thinking. It is not just about design thinking but how to use it effectively in business model design. It recognizes that system thinking also plays a role in design and integrates them into the design process. Design thinking is now increasingly used in many organizations. Design thinking introduces new design thinking tools such as journey maps to model interaction with customers. Such tools foster creativity through providing new ways to see situations and lead to creative solutions. Most of these tools are described in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 then describes some examples of application of design thinking in industry.

Chapters 5–10 describe design processes and the activities that make up these processes. This includes how design thinking can become part of any design process in an organization. The design process draws on ideas from design thinking and starts by defining themes from stories gathered from stakeholders, developing the innovations needed to address any issues identified in the theme. This is followed by defining joint value propositions, followed by system design, and then creating business models to realize the value in practice.

The book also emphasizes technology, and management and leadership and their role in design. It is not just learning about technology but seeing technology as a contributor to innovative solutions and realizing value; technology is both the driver of change as adding to business value. It is how to use the power of social media or the cloud or big data – the current popular emerging technologies? It is how we make them fit into an increasingly mobile world. You don’t have to invent a new technology but often just utilize existing technologies more creatively. You need to look at new ways of working now made possible by technology

The importance of management and leadership in encouraging design is stressed throughout the book. Its importance is both in creating a design centric culture as well as systematic design processes that bring out innovative ideas. The book provides guidelines on the management and leadership practices needed to foster the creativity all stages of the innovation value chain; the practices draw on previous experience of multi-disciplinary teams brainstorming to develop solutions that create business value. It describes tools that foster creativity and how these tools can be put together to lead to business solutions in a systematic way.

The book draws on current developments in small and major corporations, who are successfully creating a design centric culture to encourage innovation in their products and in ways they engage with clients. The business design centric culture – one that asks the question of how do I design my business to make things work better, rather than how I use the existing system to do something (Kolko, 2015); and how brainstorming together with analytical thinking are increasingly used in business to encourage innovation.

Brainstorming is emphasized in the book; it is the basic activity in design thinking – it is how ideas come up and are explored especially when combined with interdisciplinary teams who bring in ideas and critical thinking from different perspectives. This innovation process includes activities such as defining themes from stories gathered from stakeholders, addressing any issues identified in the themes, finding innovative solutions, and creating business models to realize these solutions. Guidelines to create collaborative team structures that provide the domain knowledge while supported by creativity centered tools are provided. These tools include storytelling, journey, and persona maps, defining themes and forming joint value propositions.