A Praxeological Perspective on Innovation Management and Design Thinking

Innovation Management is undergoing a crisis. The uncritical adoption of late-modern, creative innovation practices such as Design Thinking (DT) (Brown, 2009) contradict the modernist rationality of planning, managing and measuring success. These frictions, which can lead to talent loss and frustration (Augsten and Marzavan, 2017), can be regarded as symptoms of an epistemological crisis. One possible cause is the structural separation of exploitation activities (production and distribution) and exploration activities (disruptive innovation) (O'Reilly and Tushman, 2008) that push late-modern activities like DT to the periphery of organizations or into separate units. Academic attempts to understand DT's overall impact on an organization generally remain descriptive (Schmiedgen et al., 2015). More detailed research either focuses on design as an organizational function (Junginger and Faust, 2016) or on how DT helps develop individual capabilities (Liedtka, Hold and Eldridge, 2021). This paper juxtaposes classical innovation-management enablers with DT assumptions in order to highlight limitations of the structure vs. agency dichotomy. It proposes a praxeological perspective on innovation management, operationalizing the concept of social practices as "routinized types of behaviour" (Reckwitz, 2002). DT as a social practice is carried out in a net of interconnected elements and cannot be reduced to any one of them. This theoretical framework aims to inform future DT and innovation management research to reposition their epistemological assumptions within the discourses of late modernism-to be better prepared for future crises.