The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible uses, benefits, limitations and future directions of a formal knowledge integration perspective on design management. The paper develops the concepts of management thinking and design(erly) thinking, and questions the implied contention. With a knowledge perspective, design management may be seen as including the capability to integrate specialized, distributed and heterogeneous knowledge bases. Consequences regarding the characteristics of scope, flexibility and efficiency of knowledge integration indicate both greater difficulties and greater possibilities.  Regarding the architecture of knowledge, integration of design indicates a functional orientation and a limited role for design, while integration by design may indicate a strategic role.

The capability to integrate across a range of specialized knowledge bases is a crucial contemporary source of competitive advantage, and the field of knowledge integration aims at structuring the issues. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible uses, benefits, limitations and future directions of a formal knowledge integration perspective on design management. The paper develops the concepts of management thinking and design(erly) thinking, and questions the contention. With a knowledge perspective, design management may be seen as including the capability to integrate specialized, distributed and heterogeneous knowledge bases. Consequences regarding the characteristics of scope, flexibility and efficiency of knowledge integration indicate both greater difficulties and greater possibilities. Regarding the architecture of knowledge, the integration of design indicates a functional orientation and a limited role for design, while integration by design may indicate a strategic role.

Den här skriften presenterar ett urval resultat och texter från forskningsprogrammet ”Kunskapsintegration och innovation i en internationaliserande ekonomi” (Knowledge Integration and Innovation in Transnational Enterprise, KITE) som finansierats av Riksbankens Jubileumsfond i två faser under åren 2007–2015. I programmet har vi analyserat hur företag, speciellt i tekniktunga industrier, påverkas av den allt mer globala konkurrensen om nya produkter och tjänster, hur nya specialiserade kunskaper växer fram och tas tillvara, och hur de kan förenas med existerande kunskapsbas. I denna skrift finns studier på tre olika nivåer: branschnivån, med analyser av innovationsprocesser och kunskapsutmaningar i industriella sektorer; företagsnivån, med skildringar av förändringar i företagens interna organisering av kunskapsbildande processer och undersökningar av nya former för utbyte och samspel mellan företag; samt mikronivån, med undersökningar av samspelet mellan individuella specialister inom företag. Skriften vänder sig både till den intresserade allmänheten och till forskare med annan vetenskaplig bakgrund. Fokus är på internationellt konkurrerande branscher och företag, men analyserna av kunskapens delning och sammanflätning, separation och integration, har bäring också på andra kunskapsintensiva sektorer och verksamheter, från statliga verk till sjukvård.

En vetenskaplig presentation av programmets forskning under de första fyra åren finns i boken Knowledge Integration and Innovation: Critical Challenges Facing International Technology-Based Firms (redigerad av Berggren, Bergek, Bengtsson, Hobday & Söderlund och utgiven av Oxford University Press 2011). En uppföljande volym, Managing Knowledge Integration Across Boundaries, planeras av samma förlag 2016 (redigerad av Tell, Berggren, Brusoni & Van de Ven). I den medverkar ett antal internationella författare vilket visar kunskapsområdets globala tyngd och intresse. Under programmets drygt åtta år har deltagarna publicerat ett mycket stort antal artiklar, konferensbidrag, bokkapitel och liknande. För dessa hänvisar vi till programmets hemsida www.liu.se/kite.

Vi har under hela programperioden arbetat intensivt med att diskuteraoch konstruktivt kritisera och utveckla varandras bidrag. Därför har det varit naturligt att denna skrift inbegriper många programdeltagares medverkan. En presentation av samtliga medverkande finns i slutet av denna skrift. Följande KITE-forskare har medverkat i nedan angivna kapitel:

Hans Andersson (kapitel 4)

Lars Bengtsson (kapitel 7)

Marie Bengtsson (kapitel 3)

Anna Bergek (kapitel 2)

Christian Berggren (kapitel 1)

Karin Bredin (kapitel 6)

Cecilia Enberg (kapitel 5, 7)

Mattias Johansson (kapitel 4)

Nicolette Lakemond (kapitel 7)

Lars Lindkvist (kapitel 3)

Thomas Magnusson (kapitel 1)

Camilla Niss (kapitel 6)

Jonas Söderlund (kapitel 6)

Fredrik Tell (kapitel 5)

Vi vill också tacka Jenny Björkman på Riksbankens Jubileumsfond och Makadam förlag för deras engagerade arbete med redigering och produktion av slutresultatet.

Design is connected to change. Whether we start from Herbert Simon’s often cited “the transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones” (1996 p.111) or design as linked to innovation (Brown 2008, Verganti 2006) or even Heskett’s (2002) ‘betterment of the human condition’, design is a future oriented (Buchanan 2001), change inducing activity. But how is design thinking (in a wide sense) different from traditional managerial thinking in terms of the concept of change? What of the process(es) by which the existing conditions are transformed into the preferred ones, i.e. how may the change process be conceptualized in design? How does the general concern of change in the design community relate to the advances in strategic and organizational change theories? Our aim is to begin an exploration of how design may be conceptualized in relation to change.

We do this by using two out of Pettigrew’s (1987) three related aspects of change: ‘process’, how something changes, and ‘content’, i.e. what is changed, to frame design as change (the third is ‘context’, the why of change). We make an attempt to explore and identify change perspectives, explicit or implicit, in design by using Van de Ven and Poole’s (1995) synthetic model of four “basic types of process theories” (p. 511): teleology, evolution, life cycle, and dialectic, all driven by different generative mechanisms or ‘motors of change’. Van de Ven & Poole’s ideal process types do though not handle the content aspect. To capture design content, we therefore use Heskett’s (2002) division of the designed artifacts’ function into two concepts, ‘utility’ and ‘significance’.

Design processes are normally described as either of a teleological kind, i.e. driven by a goal set at the beginning of the process, or as similar to an evolutionary process. Some elements of the evolutionary model are frequent in descriptions of design processes, e.g. iterativity, prototyping and gradual development. However, the uncontrollability and slowness of evolution are less salient. A better way to frame design processes as evolutionary may therefore be to see them as guided (Lovas and Ghoshal 2000), i.e. driven not only by random mutation and competition but also by intent.

By using Heskett’s distinction between utility and significance it is possible to further dissect the design process/design processes. Processes aiming for ‘utility’ eventually must converge into a solution, but is it necessarily the same when it regards the process by which ‘significance’ is designed, created and maintained? By analytically separating (c.f. Archer 1995) the by definition integrative design process, we argue that discussing design as process and content expands previous views of design as change.

The capability to integrate across a range of specialized knowledge bases is a crucial contemporary source of competitive advantage, and the field of knowledge integration aims at structuring the issues. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible uses, benefits, limitations and future directions of a formal knowledge integration perspective on design management. The paper develops the concepts of management thinking and design(erly) thinking, and questions the contention. With a knowledge perspective, design management may be seen as including the capability to integrate specialized, distributed and heterogeneous knowledge bases. Consequences regarding the characteristics of scope, flexibility and efficiency of knowledge integration indicate both greater difficulties and greater possibilities. Regarding the architecture of knowledge, the integration of design indicates a functional orientation and a limited role for design, while integration by design may indicate a strategic role. Also, whether integration of design or by design, the construction of common knowledge, bridging the specialized fields, seems a prerequisite for the effective knowledge integration of management thinking and design(erly thinking.

Patents as a strategic tool has been much in focus lately, both in research and in the corporate world. Considering this, there has been surprisingly little interest paid to the process in which patents are generated within firms. Based on interviews with patent engineers and inventors who have been involved in interaction with each other in patenting processes, plus their patent managers, this study describe and discuss the patent drafting process as one (partly) driven by interaction. The patent drafting process is described as a process of asymmetrical collaboration delivering two distinct, but related outcomes – a refined invention and a patent application that most likely is better than it would have been otherwise. These outcomes are not cases of collective creativity as patent engineers do not invent and inventors do not (normally) define patent claims. This does not diminish the importance of the collaboration. Three roles - “opportunity recognizer”,“konstruktiver opponent”, and “enabling bureaucrat” – are identified and used to frame the patent engineers’ work and contributions to creativity.

Jan Carlzon, the Scandinavian airline SAS’ CEO during the successful eighties, tells a little story in his recently written comment to the 2008 Swedish re-issue of his 1985 book “Moments of Truth” [Swedish title: “Riv pyramiderna!” (2008)]. Carlzon describes how NOKIA’s CEO in the early 2000’s had told him that they worked like dogs to fill their mobile phones with values people were willing to pay for in order to keep the margins required. A short time later the telecom company Ericsson had its annual shareholder meeting and during the meeting a young girl asked: “Why does not Ericsson make phones that people want?” The chairman ignored the question – according to Carlzon the only relevant question asked – and instead he talked about lowering costs.

Was there something that Ericsson had not understood at the time? Their phones’ technical functionality was good so why did not people want them? Roughly ten years later we would like to, somewhat simplified, say that Ericsson had not quite understood the need for beauty in their sophisticated high-tech products. They managed to integrate everything apart from a sense of beauty, i.e. the aesthetic and symbolic aspect that made the young girl and others prefer other brands. Even if Ericson had been aware, had they able to integrate beauty and knowledge about “beauty aspects” in their products? No doubt had Ericsson been able to integrate a number of more or less related, complementary technological knowledge bases, but can knowledge about aesthetic and symbolic aspects, what we call “beauty”, be dealt with in the same way?

The contemporary need for depth of knowledge leads to increasing specialization and subsequently companies’ need for increasingly sophisticated means for integration of knowledge has increased. This is reflected in the field of knowledge integration (KI) which empirically has explored integration of knowledge bases from a rather technical, rationalistic perspective, and outputs of KI processes have in earlier research been framed in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and innovation (Tell, 2011). This is a limitation it shares with strategic management research (Dalpiaz et al 2010). However, we argue that the complexity in today’s products and services may extend beyond what the KI field have hitherto acknowledged.

A future development of the KI field could be to explore the user perspective on, and role in, the value creation and appropriation system, and to include the aesthetic and symbolic nature of products and services. This paper aims to contribute to the KI field, by exploring some consequences of extending the scope of knowledge integration to include integration of and by Industrial design.

Industrial design is a practice and a field of knowledge that spans the divide between rationalistic problem-solving and the seeming irrationality of the aesthetic and the socio-cultural (Verganti 2003). Industrial design is interesting in this context both for its content, i.e. as a field of knowledge to be integrated, and because of its process view that may be seen as an approach on how to integrate. This paper thus aims to discuss integration of and by design in order to broaden the dominating technological empirical scope of KI. We will relate integration of and by design to previous understandings of KI as a way to explore the hierarchy of capabilities (Grant 1996a).

The coming section gives a very brief introduction to KI and its relative neglect of the increasingly important knowledge about what makes people want and desire things apart from their technical functionality or use value. Then follows a section on Design and especially Industrial design where we use Grant’s (1996a) characteristics of KI to discuss how industrial design can contribute to competitive advantage from a KI view. The following section “Integration of and by design” somewhat artificially separates the content of industrial design as a field of knowledge from the view that industrial design may be a leading function pushing the envelope of technological knowledge, and thus a way of integration knowledge(s). Finally there is a discussion summarizing our arguments and findings and proposing how to go on.

Bokens syfte är att ge kunskap och inspiration åt chefer, ledare och medarbetare med intresse för kreativitet och innovation. Den baseras på forskning och tar upp exempel hämtade från många av Sveriges ledande företag. Avsikten är att belysa hur organisatoriska förhållanden påverkar förutsättningarna för kreativitet och innovation samt att ge uppslag till hur företags innovationsförmåga kan utvecklas.