Towards Design Thinking as a Management Practice: A Learning Experiment in Teaching Innovation

There is an increasing need to make management knowledge more consistent with the “messiness” and complexity of actual organizational phenomena and contexts in today’s world, calling for a refoundation of mainstream management theories. The paper focuses on the contribution of design thinking approaches in this sense, particularly addressing the question of how the predisposition for a design thinking approach can be shaped in management education. Following a qualitative inductive research design, it will report the experience of the introduction of new teaching practices inspired by design thinking in a class of students from a Master program on Innovation and Marketing in an Italian University. Based on the empirical findings, the challenges and opportunities of innovating business school teaching towards the construction of a design thinking mentality will be discussed

Design Value: The Role of Design in Innovation - Final Report

Design Value: The Role of Design in Innovation was an eighteen-month AHRC funded research project carried out in collaboration with Innovate UK and the Knowledge Transfer Network Special Interest Group on Design. The principal aim of this research was to identify the roles design can play in innovation, the contributions of those roles to innovation, and the conditions under which these contributions actually happen

Creative clusters and sparse spaces: Manchester’s creative industries and the geographies of deprivation and prosperity

The aim of this paper is to ‘take stock’ of the creative industries in Manchester and to explore their geographies through analysing official statistics on employment and workplaces; in terms of location, size, growth, productivity and turnover.The aggregated creative industries (CIs) presence in Manchester is substantially larger than those in ‘rival’ cities in the midlands and north of England. But Manchester’s creative industries are also only a fraction of those in London, and the CIs in Manchester account for less than half the share of all workplaces and employment that they do in London.The report authors argue that Narrowing the gap is not impossible, but it is important that policy makers recognise that growing the CIs outside of London and the South East is a major, long-term challenge, and that relatively small, short-term initiatives will prove inadequate.The CIs in the Manchester city-region are largely concentrated in the city centre, Salford Quays and a few other small areas, which are predominantly among the most affluent in the city-region. There are large areas with very little to no creative industries employment especially in the north side of the city region.In many ways Manchester reproduces at the city-region level the inequalities that exist across the UK as a whole. The central policy challenge is to enhance opportunities in the poor and deprived areas of Manchester.How to level up the Manchester city-region and beyond the scope of this paper however the author suggests it is likely to require both increasing access to existing ‘hot spots’ of opportunity (such as the city centre and Salford Quays), but also bringing opportunities to people.The author suggests the challenge of levelling up opportunities within regions is probably at least as great as the challenge of levelling up across regions

R&D, design and innovation: Examining the links in the creative industries

This paper provides policymakers, academics, and creative industry organisations with one of the first analyses of how much creative industries organisations are investing in R&D and engaging in innovation activities. It finds that some of these activities and investments are highly valuable and have a big impact on creative industries organisations (CIOs), while others have a much lower impact and aren’t worth the investment. It ends with a set of recommendations for how policymakers and managers can raise the rate and impact of innovations in creative industry organisations.Identifying ‘creative industries’ or ‘creative occupations’ can be challenging. Since the establishment of the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) in 1997, which was given a new responsibility for the’ creative industries’, policymakers and academics have spent considerable effort agreeing on definitions of ‘creative’ and designing frameworks to assign economic activities and organisations to creative categories.One of the core objectives of the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre is to build on this work and establish a strong evidence base for the value of the creative industries, and their unique contribution to the economy. Despite being one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, and contributing over £115bn a year to the UK, we still haven’t got a clear picture for how good CIO’s are at innovation and research and development. This is an important research topic. Although CIO’s can operate in quite different ways to organisations in other sectors of the economy, they are still businesses, and can face similar challenges. This paper is an analysis of the responses to a survey from DCMS carried out in 2020, designed to find out how much research and development activities were being undertaken by creative industries organisations. The survey was completed by 625 creative industry organisations based in the UK, 89% of which were firms

Creative clusters and sparse spaces::Manchester’s creative industries and the geographies of deprivation and prosperity

The aim of this paper is to ‘take stock’ of the creative industries in Manchester and to explore their geographies through analysing official statistics on employment and workplaces; in terms of location, size, growth, productivity and turnover.The aggregated creative industries (CIs) presence in Manchester is substantially larger than those in ‘rival’ cities in the midlands and north of England. But Manchester’s creative industries are also only a fraction of those in London, and the CIs in Manchester account for less than half the share of all workplaces and employment that they do in London.The report authors argue that Narrowing the gap is not impossible, but it is important that policy makers recognise that growing the CIs outside of London and the South East is a major, long-term challenge, and that relatively small, short-term initiatives will prove inadequate.The CIs in the Manchester city-region are largely concentrated in the city centre, Salford Quays and a few other small areas, which are predominantly among the most affluent in the city-region. There are large areas with very little to no creative industries employment especially in the north side of the city region.In many ways Manchester reproduces at the city-region level the inequalities that exist across the UK as a whole. The central policy challenge is to enhance opportunities in the poor and deprived areas of Manchester.How to level up the Manchester city-region and beyond the scope of this paper however the author suggests it is likely to require both increasing access to existing ‘hot spots’ of opportunity (such as the city centre and Salford Quays), but also bringing opportunities to people.The author suggests the challenge of levelling up opportunities within regions is probably at least as great as the challenge of levelling up across regions

The sources and aims of innovation in services: Variety between and within sectors

Services dominate economic activity, but remain under-researched by analysts of innovation and technological change. The early 'one size fits all' theories of innovation in services have in recent years given way to an appreciation that services are diverse, not least in their innovation activities. This paper draws on recent empirical evidence from large-scale surveys undertaken in 13 western European countries, to investigate the extent and the sources of innovation in five services sectors. The analysis includes the extent to which services innovate, and amongst innovators the extent to which they engage in R&D and collaborative arrangements for innovation. The analysis supports the recent literature which emphasises significant differences between sectors in their pattern of innovation behaviour, but also highlights significant intra-sectoral differences in innovation behaviour. This intra-sectoral variation deserves much fuller investigation in the future.Services, Innovation, Technological Change, Europe,