Journal of Design, Business & Society - Sustainability & Design Research, Oct 2023

Design research is a powerful agent in the transition to a more sustainable future. This Special Issue of the Journal of Design, Business and Society demonstrates how design research is creating environmental, social and economic value in multiple contexts, by supporting intrapreneurial behaviours in the UN’s Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and balancing interests in the ‘chicken and egg’ challenge of green hydrogen. It discusses what the designer’s role is in developing a more circular economy, and asks how bibliometric methods and storytelling might help design researchers to situate themselves in a complex landscape and challenge themselves to be part of a world that is better by design.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), a large, global organization, provides vital services and advocacy for millions of displaced persons around the world within a complex and unique mandate. To meet increasing demands in creative ways while fostering a culture of intrapreneurship, the organization has set up the Innovation Fellowship Programme, a learning initiative. This article examines how design may be used to foster intrapreneurship within large organizations. Through this single-case study we examine capabilities identified through mixed-methods within the context of an intrapreneurial process. Mapping abilities between individual vs. collective and exploration vs. exploitation dimensions enabled building a design-driven, stepwise intrapreneurial process model based on effectuation principles, recognizing the causation factors at play. Enabling structures and early, deep embeddedness of the design approaches, tools and methods have been found to enable success in developing intrapreneurial capabilities. Recognizing the importance of processes in applying design within organizations, this article maps out identified intrapreneurial capabilities to individual and collective orientations and the continuum between exploration and exploitation. Through a stepwise, design-driven process modelling, the article joins the competing logics and practices of effectuation and exploration of new opportunities with causation and the exploitation of existing resources, building on individual and collective capabilities and ambidexterity. Large, global and complex organizations have multiple challenges in suffusing design practices within their structure, capabilities and processes. While unleashing the potential of individual intrapreneurs is seen as important, the knowledge of how to create conducive structures, enable organizational processes and attend to individual capability build-up remains elusive, warranting attention. The article contributes to understanding how design can enable and enhance intrapreneurship in large global organizations through facilitating structures, developing intrapreneurial capabilities and modelling conducive processes.

In this interview, we explore the concept of the circular economy with Catherine Weetman, author of A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business. The broad-ranging discussion explores the circular economy, its contribution to a more sustainable future, the role that designers currently play and future directions for design researchers.

Organizational storytelling/narrative was largely ignored in the academic literature before the 1970s. Today, however, with the spread of ‘storytelling thinking’, this concept has been explored across disciplines including sociology, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Although much research has emerged in the field of organizational narrative/storytelling, no study has addressed the bibliography of this subject quantitatively. This article is a bibliometric study of organizational storytelling/narration that aims to fill this gap. The data came from the Web of Science (WoS), which includes 441 documents between 1955 and January 2022. VOSviewer software was used to draw charts and create tables. The findings show that most documents have been published in this area in the last two decades, mainly in the United States. This bibliographic study offers two key findings for the field of organization storytelling. First, co-citation analysis provides four clusters, namely Cluster 1: healthcare, Cluster 2: stories of a darker side, Cluster 3: collective centring and collective sensemaking to express organizational culture and Cluster 4: identity and knowledge, shows in which topics the researchers of organizational storytelling/narrative have been most active. Second, co-occurrence analysis presents six clusters, Cluster 1: identification, Cluster 2: systems, Cluster 3: evolution, Cluster 4: performance, Cluster 5: power and Cluster 6: self, which are placed in a logical path related to the maturity levels of the organization and illustrate the topics that correspond to each organizational maturity level. Given the nature of the narrative/story, future researchers are likely to focus more on qualitative analysis and other aspects of quantitative analysis, including citations. Future research should focus on quantitative and qualitative analysis of the existing models of storytelling/narrative.