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BARRIERS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF IMPLEMENTING DESIGN THINKING IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS OF A BUSINESS TO BUSINESS COMPANY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2021

Harshavardhan Ramanujam ,
Balachandar Ravichandran ,
Susanne Nilsson  and
Lars Ivansen
Harshavardhan Ramanujam*
Affiliation:
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Balachandar Ravichandran
Affiliation:
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Susanne Nilsson
Affiliation:
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Lars Ivansen
Affiliation:
Chalmers University of Technology
*
Ramanujam, Harshavardhan, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Integrated Product Development and Design, Sweden, harshavardhanstramanujam@gmail.com

Abstract

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Customer centricity is described as placing value creation for customers at the core of business decisions and organizational practices and is progressively regarded as a foundation of sustainable competitive advantage by companies. Hence in recent years, there is a shift from companies being product-centric to them adapting customer-centric practices as a practice to create balanced and sustainable businesses. Although there are several methods and processes that can help companies become customer-centric; Design Thinking (DT) is championed by many practitioners and academics alike as being effective in introducing customer-centricity in organizations. Despite being a highly researched topic in the last decade, the bulk of the research is focused on success stories or one-off cases of using design thinking in Business to Customer (B2C) environments. This paper is based on a qualitative study performed at a high-tech Swedish electronics company and focuses on highlighting the barriers and opportunities of adapting DT in Business to Business (B2B) companies with established product development processes. The barriers we identified can help companies to address the impediments and will make the DT implementation easier for companies

Keywords

Design ThinkingBusiness to BusinessIntegrated product developmentInnovationDesign methodology

Information

Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 1: ICED21 , August 2021 , pp. 551 - 560
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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