Editors' note

Citation

Liedtka, J., Martin, R. and ogilvie, d. (2007), "Editors' note", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 28 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbs.2007.28828daa.001

Editor's note

Article Type: Editor's note From: Journal of Business Strategy, Volume 28, Issue 4

We volunteered to pull together this special issue of JBS because we are passionate believers in the potential that design thinking holds for business and tired of the “iPOD as icon” phenomenon that equates design exclusively with high-end new products. Despite seemingly endless exhortations about the value of design in business, the conversations never seem to recognize that design holds out any promise greater than the creation of sleek, high-end products. But design offers business so much more. To illustrate this, we need to swim upstream from the act of designing to the thinking behind design in order to show how design thinking can help businesses develop better, unique and creative strategies. In this special issue, our goal is to thoroughly explore the concept of design thinking and demonstrate how business can fully exploit its exciting potential.

In “Design and business: why can’t we be friends,?” business-school dean and former consultant Roger Martin looks at the schism between designers and executives that exists today despite the rosy promise that design offers the business world. He examines the fundamental tension between the orientation to reliability that characterizes the business world and the validity orientation of designers and offers advice to both parties about how to get along better.

A troika of articles examines where the inspiration for invention comes from and finds it in the diverse perspectives of artists, philosophers and engineers. Artist and adjunct management professor Hilary Austen Johnson turns our attention first to artistry in business. In “Artistry for the strategist,” she describes the conditions necessary for the practice of artistry, arguing that the need for artistry is compelling in the field of business strategy. The quest, she asserts, is defined by the search for the “dynamic balance” between the opposing, but equally necessary, forces of mastery and originality. Consultant Tony Golsby-Smith turns to philosophy in “The second road of thought: how design offers strategy a new toolkit,” arguing that our obsession with Aristotle’s analytics has made us lose sight of his other approach, one focused on rhetoric. This “second road” offers breakthrough possibilities for creating new strategic conversations. Professors Robert Friedel and Jeanne Liedtka, a historian and strategist respectively, offer a series of engineering breakthroughs that highlight some of the paths to possibilities thinking in “Possibility thinking: lessons from breakthrough engineering.”

Next, we look at the precursors to invention. Here, Nicholas Dew, a faculty member at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, unpacks the often mysterious process of abduction in “Abduction: a precondition for the intelligent design of strategy.” In abduction, the inferences are made that often determine the way the design problem is framed. He examines the key role that abduction plays in design processes and strategic decision-making and suggests a framework for assessing the quality of the resulting hypotheses. In “Daily life, not markets: customer-centered design,” Vijay Kumar and Patrick Whitney of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Design Institute contribute a hands-on view of the value and practices associated with a true customer connection, still rare in business today despite our illusions of customer centricity.

The second half of the special issue looks at design thinking in action. In “Learning to design: giving purpose to hand, heart, and mind,” Sabine Junginger of Lancaster University’s Institute for Contemporary Arts explores how design schools educate their students and offers a starting point for businesses with similar intentions. Two of our articles look at how we plan in organizations and present two very different methodologies for incorporating design thinking into an organization’s strategic planning process. Heather M.A. Fraser, director of the Designworks lab at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, describes its “three gear process” involving the development of deep user understanding, concept visualization and strategic business design in her article, “The practice of breakthrough strategies by design.” Then, in “Strategizing through playful design,” Claus D. Jacobs, senior research fellow at the University of St. Gallen, and Loizos Heracleous, professor of strategy at the University of Warwick, examine the value that play can bring to strategic conversations. The paper describes a group exercise where executives engage with potentially contentious strategic issues through the design of real artifacts that use physical metaphors. The authors argue that their approach spurs better strategy discussions by creating generative dialogue and they discuss the conditions necessary to foster such productive play.

Taken together, we believe that these nine articles deepen and enrich our understanding of the business possibilities inherent in design thinking. We hope that you agree.

Jeanne Liedtka, Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

Roger Martin, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

dt ogilvie, Rutgers Business School, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA