Книги

During the last years a debate has raged within the field of Strategic Management between a rational view (IO, Positioning School, Strategic Planning, Cybernetics) and a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) view (Emergent strategies,complexity theory, chaos theory) of the field. This paper attempts to shed some light around an issue which must be clarified for the better development of such debate. Being the CAS view a response to the new realities of environmental turbulence, it was discussed which are the behavioral sources of such turbulence in order to clarify if such phenomena is a qualitatively new reality of business environments, or simply a contingent but circumstantial feature affecting many industries. For this purpose, the authors introduced and applied a theoretical model that conceives the strategy of the firm, as a dialectic process in a situation of conflict.

User information is an important source of user-centered innovation. Through the investigation of 47 user-centered case studies collected from leading design consulting firms, this study aims to establish the relationship between user-research and design innovation, to identify the research characteristics and analytic models critical to each innovation situation, and to discuss where, why, and how the research and analysis should be done so that information is gathered efficiently and is available to the team at the right time in the multi-disciplinary design process. This study suggests new approaches to user-research planning, an alternative mental model of design innovation, and a different way of describing user-research in relation to design innovation. The investigation reveals how user-research should be planned, conducted and tailored for each innovation situation.

This article presents a new method for the development of product ideas, where the initial focus for development is not product ideas, but fantasy worlds. Based on a mental visualization session groups develop fantasy worlds through writing stories in circles. Some of these stories are acted out in scenario play. Phrases from these stories are then used as basis for idea development. This method gives interesting ideas that would be hard to come up with through traditional brainstorming. It helps to get a broader and deeper understanding of the design task and it strongly influences the team spirit and atmosphere. The method is presented through a case with industrial design students in Oslo, where the task was to develop new mouth hygiene products for the Norwegian company Jordan.