Design Thinking in Practice: How Practitioners Navigate the Transition from Early Exploration to Implementation

Sammanfattning

Design thinking has become a widely adopted approach to innovation management, withstrong empirical support for its effectiveness at the front end of innovation. Yet many designthinking projects generate promising concepts that never reach sustained implementation.This thesis explores how organisations that adopt design thinking navigate the transition fromearly exploration to implementation, and what conditions enable or hinder that process.The study draws on semi-structured interviews with design and innovation practitionersacross Swedish and Norwegian public and private sector organisations. Data were analysedusing the Gioia methodology, moving inductively from practitioner accounts towardtheoretical constructs.Four findings emerge. First, practitioners consistently distance themselves from the label"design thinking" as a strategic decision about the political conditions surrounding theirwork. Second, the exploration-to-implementation gap appears to be structural rather thanmethodological: the conditions determining implementation success are largely establishedbefore the design process begins, and appear largely indifferent to design quality. Third,practitioners have independently developed a coherent set of bridging strategies, includingparallel implementation planning, internal champion building, and sceptic-to-advocateconversion, that work by changing the political and relational conditions surrounding aproject. Fourth, organisational and leadership conditions, particularly industry heritage as aninherited antecedent and the internal empathy deficit in design practice, shape whatimplementation becomes possible.The study contributes to the design thinking literature by challenging the assumption thathuman-centred design work carries structural implementation advantages, introducingindustry heritage as a theoretically distinct antecedent category, and identifying bridgingstrategies as a body of practitioner knowledge not yet captured in existing frameworks.