Journal of Design, Business & Society - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015

The police in Denmark have made a strategic intent to engage and activate external stakeholders in crime prevention efforts. However, knowledge of how to unfold the potential of such multi-stakeholder, co-creation-based business models is scarce. The current study was initiated to explore the roles of design thinking and strategic visualization in designing for multi-stakeholder, co-creation-based business models. The study is based on the design, execution and results of a workshop with the Danish police in which almost 100 innovation professionals worked on designing solutions for crime prevention challenges identified and put forth by the Danish police. The article points to how design thinking and strategic visualization can be essential vehicles in realizing the potential of co-creation-based business models by allowing for emergence, while at the same time creating clarity that potentially leads to a productive reframing of the targeted challenge.

This study explores the applicability of usability design processes in the development of a complex medical device in order to enhance the marketability and user acceptance of such.

In healthcare, risk mitigation and prevention of potential use errors are the prevailing topics that need to be addressed throughout the development processes of medical devices. However, it is also acknowledged that medical device manufacturers ought to go beyond the mere functional and safety-related aspects of the device-to-be since potential customers also consult usability testing results before purchasing such systems. Yet, it remains unclear how and at what development stage manufacturers include the user perspective in their design iterations in order to enhance the system’s usability.

Through action research, this study investigates the approach towards product usability applied throughout the development process of a medical device manufacturer. Interdisciplinary usability workshops were conducted, involving designers and application specialists from within the company that represent future users of the device. These so-called user proxies are able to provide the input from a user perspective at several stages of the design process. It was found that device usability is considered as a crucial topic in order to detect and mitigate use errors as early as possible. Including user proxies in the development process is beneficial to receive feedback from internal professionals that come closest to future users of the system. However, it is challenging to translate user proxies’ insights directly into the development process due to the system’s complexity and technical constraints.

The study presents an outline of how to make the usability aspects fit into current development processes in order to increase user acceptance. It contributes to academia and practice alike as a starting point to further investigate how to integrate and standardize usability design processes throughout the development of medical devices.

Access to nutritious, safe and culturally appropriate food is a basic human right (Mechlem, 2004). Food sovereignty defines this right through the empowerment of the people to redefine food and agricultural systems, and through ecologically sustainable production methods. At the heart of the food sovereignty movement are the interests of producers, distributors and consumers, rather than the interests of markets and corporations, which dominate the current globalized food system (Hinrichs, 2003). Food sovereignty challenges designers to enable people to innovate the food system. We are yet to develop economically viable solutions for scaling projects and providing citizens, governments and business with tools to develop and promote projects to innovate food systems and promote food sovereignty (Meroni, 2011; Murray, Caulier-Grice and Mulgan, 2010). This article examines how a design-led approach to innovation can assist in the development of new business models and ventures for local food systems: this is presented through an emerging field of research ‘Design-Led Food Communities’. Design-Led Food Communities enables citizens, governments and business to innovate local food projects through the application of design. This article reports on the case study of the Docklands Food Hub Project in Melbourne, Australia. Preliminary findings demonstrate valued outcomes, but also a deficiency in the design process to generate food solutions collaboratively between government, business and citizens.

Celebrities are one of the most commonly used elements in advertising, as both design elements to signal the brand and as creative devices to attract attention and increase the consumers’ positive attitude to the advertisement. This raises two issues. The first is that despite the cost, as celebrities can be very expensive, prior literature has provided mixed results regarding celebrity contribution to effective advertising. The second is the possibility of conflicting objectives, in that a celebrity that is a powerful enough creative device to lift the cut through of the advertising may distract rather than build attention to the brand. Therefore, an advertisement gains on one dimension of advertising effectiveness but loses on another.

This multi-country study examines the strengths and weaknesses of celebrities as design elements in advertising, using advertisement recall, likeability and correct branding as advertising effectiveness measures. This research shows that celebrities cannot be used as silver bullets to guarantee effective advertising. We find no support that celebrity advertisements systematically outperform non-celebrity advertisements on any of the three advertising effectiveness measures. Category-level analysis reveals that advertisements with celebrities both outperform and underperform advertisements without celebrities. Further analysis with a classification of celebrity professions shows the superiority of athlete celebrities against non-celebrity advertisements in advertisement likeability. This suggests that there are extraneous factors which impact on advertising effectiveness when celebrities are involved. Our testing of some possible extraneous factors did not reveal anything significant.

This study examines the role of emotion and logic in the business case for sustainable building initiatives. Existing literature on the business case for design of buildings is disjointed. It tends to focus either on financial performance and associated arguments, or intangibles such as reputation.

While the literature is not as polarized as this simplification, it does fail to provide a coherent framework for designers and project sponsors to understand how sustainable design initiatives end up being in building projects. Furthermore, it fails to acknowledge a range of decision-making biases that researchers have found to occur in a wide variety of contexts. These factors may be leading to missed opportunities for stakeholders to make better design proposals.

This article draws on a range of literature including behavioural economics, judgment and decision-making, green buildings and sustainability communication, as well as my own experiences as an engineer and sustainable building practitioner of over ten years, to suggest approaches that designers and project sponsors might take. It then uses a framework of sustainability routes into projects to show how the approaches might be applied in different contexts.

This article is an attempt to crystallize and better inform my own approach to selling sustainability in buildings; as such it is part research agenda and part anecdotal experience. This reflects the nature of my practice in buildings, where each project tends to be its own prototype, and knowledge is built up progressively, project to project. The hope is that the article will seed ideas and encourage a learning-by-doing approach by designers and project sponsors.

Armed with this information, project sponsors and designers might better understand the interrelated role of emotion and logic in sustainable design, and be able to identify opportunities for more sustainable building, benefiting both business and the planet.

Predicting the success of a potential breakthrough innovative business opportunity in New Product Development (NPD) is notoriously difficult and is synonymous with high market and technology risk. As a consequence, NPD organizations favour concurrent exploration of multiple concepts where the most promising concepts are evaluated and selected at each stage-gate. The two challenges associated with this approach are ensuring a sufficiently wide exploration of the market–technology space, followed by assessing the potential of breakthrough innovations. Individual designers usually conduct early exploration independently or within design teams, applying an organic and analogous search approach. In contrast, the project team members collectively make decisions for early design concept selection, applying a non-analytical and unstructured decision-making process. The combination of grounded exploratory study and hypothesis-driven study examines the use of gamification and, in particular, how gamification can assist in promoting the exploration of breakthrough innovative concepts in the early design concept phase, combined with concurrent and early identification of the most promising candidates.

Studies conducted consisted of a pilot study at Copenhagen Business School where we identified migration of risk in the business phase and two other studies conducted in the Design Technology and Innovation Management project courses at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea. The last two studies were a baseline study and an experimentation study, where we observed and collected teams’ market and technology risk-preferences, teams’ and external panel’s grading as well as Design Quality Criteria scoring. In the second study, we established the baseline for risk-­preference migration and in the third study we implemented eight weeks of gamification, applying the Prediction Market approach.

The findings showed that gamification promotes extended risk-taking, can assess team-confidence and decision-making ability and acts as an early indicator of the performance of the final concepts. Suggestions for future studies include testing of gamification on industry projects and making it operational by adapting the approach to the NPD culture, organizational structures and project decision-making processes.