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8th European Academy Of Design Conference - 1st, 2nd & 3rd April 2009, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland
TOWARDS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL MERGER OF DESIGN THINKING,
STRATEGY AND INNOVATION
Ulla JOHANSSON1 and Jill WOODILLA2
1Busines & Design LAB, Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
2John F Welch College of Business, Sacred Heart University, U.S.

ABSTRACT
In this paper we explore and integrate ideas from three disciplines that influence design management:
strategy as the organizational framework, innovation as the marketplace imperative, and design thinking
as a way of approaching practical problems and problem solving. The discourse of strategy expanded in
the 1980s and 1990s and continues to be a powerful force. Around the millennium, the discourse of
innovation gained new prestige; it was linked to strategy and became the hallmark of companies in the
forefront of the global economy. Design thinking has joined these executive discourses as a methodology
that enables innovation. In this paper we first examine the three discourses and their epistemological
underpinning and relation to each other. Thereafter we note that there seems to be an epistemological
shift within both innovation and strategy – and that this shift is towards the central and enduring beliefs of
design thinking. Finally we reflect on the implications for design management.
Keywords: Design thinking, innovation, strategy, epistemology
1 INTRODUCTION
The three discourses of strategy, innovation and design thinking have a paradoxical relationship. From
one perspective, the three discourses are quite separate, with very different origins and purposes. Strategy
is an executive discourse that focuses on long-term goals, resource allocation, and decision making.
Innovation is a technological discourse that aims to be knowledgeable about bringing inventions to the
market. Design thinking is an emerging discourse coming from architecture, design, and art that strives to
understand the character of designers’ sense making. It is lately infiltrating the management discourse. On
the other hand, there are similarities among all three discourses. They are all used in large and small
companies when referring to growth-intended strategic work. Also, they are used by top management for
organizational change and thereby as competitive “tools” for growth.
In this paper we explore how to make sense of the separate discourses, the characteristics and
relationships between them, and how they might contribute to an integrated discourse. How do they relate
to each other – are they complimentary or are they competing discourses? In particular, how does design
thinking stand in relation to the others? What consequences does this have for the design management
discourse?

2 THE DISCOURSE OF STRATEGY
Strategic discourses generally acknowledge their roots in the discourse of military orders in the ancient
world. The word comes from the Greek strategia, meaning “generalship”, suggesting goals and directions
that were set outside of the sight of the enemy. While this discourse of strategy existed long before it was
an academic field, phrases in the management discourse such as “battle of competition”, “winning”, and
“rivalry”, are signs of its origins, including Clausewitz’s (2001) definition of strategy as “the art of using
a battle to win a war” while tactics are “using the troops to win a battle”. Warfare metaphors still inform
prescriptions for how to use the company’s resources in order to “win the competitive battle”.
During the 1950s and 1960s, when management struggled for a place in the academy, strategy came to
signify creating a specific position in the market. The foundation of strategic management is frequently
traced to Chandler’ (1962) comparative analysis that identified patterns in the growth of diversified
companies during the 1920s and 30s (Whittington, 2008). Chandler, as a business historian, worked with
messy empirical data; in contrast, Anshoff (1965), with a background in applied mathematics, created
analytical tools to help companies create their own position through attention to the five elements of (1)
arenas, (2) vehicles, (3)differentiators, (4) staging, and (5) economic logic. Michael Porter further

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developed Anshoff’s analytics within the managerial discourse and authored many books and articles
over a twenty year period, including a series in the Harvard Business Review (1979, 1987, 1990, 1996,
2008). Through these, and many others on strategy and competitiveness for the firm, economic
development, and society, Porter continues to be recognized as a, if not the¸ leading authority on business
strategy (www.isc.hbs.edu ). His work sedimented the strategic management discourse as normative,
static, and a way for the chief executive to formulate a plan before it was implemented by the
organizational hierarchy.
During the 1990s other influential strategy streams developed, included those emanating from a resource-
based economic perspective (see Barney, Wright and Ketchen, 2001). For managers, Prahalad and
Hamel’s (1990) concept of core competencies as collective learning in the organization provided an
impetus for working across organizational boundaries and creating alliances while focusing on internal
development. While still prescriptive, this theme pointed towards a more collaborative discourse. A
more process oriented view of strategy was introduced by Mintzberg (1987, 1994), who first critiqued the
dominant view of equating strategic planning with strategic thinking, and later defined strategy as
patterns of action, with differences between have turned the strategic discourse towards actor-network
theory and its possibilities for mobilizing social networks of relationships in the process of creating
strategic differentiation (cf., Hung, 2002)
With the new millennium and “flattening” of the global landscape (Friedman 2005) part of the strategic
discourse reexamined the structuralist view of firms forced to compete within a landscape dominated by
economic forces greater than themselves. Instead embraced, some took a reconstructalist worldview in
which market boundaries and industries can be reconstructed by actions and beliefs of industry players, as
so-called Blue Ocean Strategies (Kim and Mauborgne, 2004). Rather than competing within the existing
industry or trying to steal customers from rivals in the “red ocean”, a company can create an uncontested
market space that makes competition irrelevant; this is a “blue ocean.” The discourse is concerned with
the strategic moves, as managerial actions and decisions, rather than naming competitors or rivals.

3 THE DISCOURSE OF INNOVATION
The word innovation comes from Latin innovare, meaning “making something new.” Innovation is an
area consisting of many different discourses, with even the discussion around “what is an innovation?”
taking on the character of a discourse of its own. The concept is used on multiple levels; the
micro/individual level, organizational level, and macro/national level.
Within the academy, the origin of the discourse on the economic character of innovations is attributed to
Schumpeter (1934) who maintained that innovation and entrepreneurship drive economic development
forward. An innovation, he said, is any invention (including a theoretical idea) in use, and thereby also an
invention that has reached the market. Schumpeter also made the distinction between incremental and
radical or disruptive innovations, thus initiating the discourse further developed by Christensen (1997).
Christensen observed that some firms had success with products or services that were not as good as
those already used in established markets, but had simplicity or low cost that appealed to a new set of
customers. Assink (2006) provided a conceptual model of the interrelationships and interdependence of
factors inhibiting disruptive innovations.
Following World War II, another innovation discourse originated in the technical universities, and is still
growing. This discourse aims to codify the sources, goals, measures, and diffusion of product and
service innovations (Abernathy and Utterback, 1978); over time the technical discourse has became less
theoretical and more normative, aiming at understanding the process of making an invention into an
innovation, or how to take a new technological idea into the market with commercial success. As this
technical discourse grew, critique against it developed; for example, Mensch (1979) proposed that the
“wave” model of Shumpeter and others be replaced with a metamorphosis model of long-term instability,
while Verganti (2006) claimed that there are no epistemological borders for innovations, they are
whatever is regarded as new to the market, whether physical or not.
A special discourse is that of open innovation (Cheesbrough, 2003, von Hippel, 2001), with roots in
computer science, sports products, and R&D practices. This discourse shuns the logic of an internally-
oriented, centralized approach to product development, and instead brings external ideas into play with
those of internal developers. Here user innovation communities create user-designed modifications, and
in turn share these with other users. Von Hippel also introduced the concept of “lead users” and regarded
them as co-producers in the innovation process, thereby merging with approaches that are traditionally
related to design methods.