Event Details
Entrepreneurship and design share many similarities, both as purposeful activities and increasingly also as fields of research and education. Both concern artifact-centred processes in which final outcomes emerge through processes that revolve around intermediate representations including briefs, plans, conceptual models, sketches, physical/digital prototypes etc. For both designers and entrepreneurs, such artifacts serve as evolving boundary objects that allow them to express their vision and engage stakeholders in the process as they move towards a specific, desired outcome.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the historical focus on different types of artifacts, these two fields have great potential for fruitful cross-disciplinary conversations. There is a growing interest in exploring such synergies. In the entrepreneurship field, entrepreneuring is increasingly conceptualised as a form of designing since this improves understanding of entrepreneurship as a concrete process, which in turn leads to theories that are more managerially useful. In the design field, there has long been a tendency to understand the design process within the broader context of organisations and from theoretical perspectives deriving from management.
In light of this, Journal of Business Venturing Design is putting together a special issue exploring the interface between design and entrepreneurship. In addition to editor-in-chief Henrik Berglund, the special issue will be co-edited by two scholars rooted in the field of entrepreneurship/management (Dimo Dimov, Raghu Garud) and two from the field of design (Kees Dorst, Peter Lloyd). As a first step, we will organise a workshop at the University of Bath where scholars from both fields can present and engage each other’s ideas. For this workshop, we solicit three-page paper ideas/extended abstracts from researchers in design, entrepreneurship, management and related fields who wish to contribute to this special topic. Potential conceptual themes of interest include, but are not limited to: design process, design theory, design methodology, boundary objects and design artifacts, affordance theory, sociomateriality, practice theory, postphenomenology, aesthetics, and process ontology. Both conceptual and empirical contributions are welcome.
Following the workshop, authors of the most promising abstracts will be invited to submit full papers to the special issue. Full papers should have a maximum of 8000 words (excluding references and other elements outside the main body of text).
Timeline
Dec 15 Deadline for submission of extended abstracts
Dec 20 Invitations of selected submissions to paper development workshop
March 12 Presentation and discussion of full paper drafts at the University of Bath
TBD Submission
Submission of full papers
● Please submit your three-page paper ideas/extended abstracts to: henber@chalmers.se.
● Please include the keyword “DEBath” in the email subject line.
