Struggles and Triggers in a Design Thinking journey

Scholarly and practitioners’ literature have both described the potential benefits of using Design Thinking (DT) to develop innovations and foster creativity. Arguably, innovation and creativity processes are widely characterized by continues competing demands, which generate tensions. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze an innovation process informed by DT when newly adopted, and isolate the elements (struggles and triggers) which accompany participants as they work through organizational conflicting demands. Following a qualitative inductive research design, the study reports the experience of the introduction of new teaching practices inspired by design thinking in a class of students without any previous design training, from a Master program on Innovation and Marketing in an Italian University. The originality of the paper lies in the fact that it reports and analyses the particular point of view of each student, often including their feelings and cognitions, during the overall process. This particular angle allows us to identify and describe three main struggles and triggers (destabilizing, non-deciding, abstracting) for newly adopters in every step of the DT process. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of Design Thinking by acknowledging its challenges and the cost of it, in order to be able to apply it as an organizational resource when facing competing demands