Conference Agenda

The boundaries between design and entrepreneurship are fuzzy and their individual characteristics are not clearly established. Within this fuzzy realm, two core capabilities are seen to interplay with positive effects. These are Creative Confidence and Entrepreneurial Agency.

This paper introduces a Rapid Design Intervention theory, developed by the lead author, which recognises this interplay and together with a further exploration, indicates that this combination might enhance resilience.

The doctoral study leading to the Rapid Design Intervention theory has been conducted using constructivist grounded theory. A mix of planned and opportunistic data collection methods with 17 organisations and 25 participants led to a total of 81 data collection activities. The analytical process using initial, focused and theoretical coding was captured through 55 memos. This conceptual exploration is bringing together two subsequent research projects in which the research team have been regularly engaging, with findings from the doctoral study, through the lens of Creative Resilience.

The result of this conceptual exploration is a reflective conceptualisation of Creative Resilience, which authors recognise as an individual’s capacity to recover and grow from unsatisfactory outcomes resulting from their own creative work and their ability to turn their creativity inwards to recover and grow in the face of existential change.

The implications of this paper are of importance for academics teaching entrepreneurship, design and other creative subjects, as it explores how conditions may be created that promote the development of Creative Resilience. The paper will also be of interest to creative and entrepreneurial practitioners who may find change unduly challenging.

This exploratory study clarifies how aesthetic design can help firms avoid commoditization (i.e., product imitation) by employing consumer survey data to generalize how five dimensions of User Value: Social Value, Significance Value, Utility Value, Emotional Value, and Spiritual Value provide a potentially powerful foundation reinforce differentiation in highly competitive marketplaces and maintain pricing power (i.e., the ability to set and maintain prices without significantly impacting consumer willingness to pay) in the athletic footwear context. Empirical results demonstrate that while respondents considered the overall running shoe marketplace to be highly commoditized, when evaluating three specific running shoe products: Shoe A. (Trail runner), Shoe B. (Value Runner), and Shoe C. (Lightweight Racer) significant differences were exhibited between elements of User Value and Willingness to Pay. This outcome contradicts much business strategy orthodoxy which contends that as competitive intensity and commoditization increase in a marketplace the less User Value consumers perceive and, consequently, the lower their willingness to pay. Whereas this study provides a broad exploratory foundation from which aesthetic design may be further explored as a method to capture, codify, and imbue products with User Value thereby avoiding the devolutionary effects of commodification.

To survive in the long term, companies must maintain and expand their competitiveness. Digitalization and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) are currently important drivers that demand a high degree of willingness to change from companies. SMEs are facing major and completely new challenges, as a meaningful and sustainable departure from the traditional cannot be achieved without efforts and the use of completely new methods. In addition, SMEs lack an entry point for identifying AI fields of application that make sense for their specific company. The field study provides insight into the potential of creative methods and skills for identifying company-specific fields and uses an agile and easy-to-implement creative process – the "ideas workshop" – to identify company-specific areas of application for digitalization and AI.

This work shows that creativity can lead to a variety of company-specific AI application ideas. These are derived from the domain knowledge of employees and involve "non-technicians" in the design of AI applications for the implementation of the digital transformation as part of the socio-technical perspective.