The key research themes addressed by this group are Front-end Innovation, Meaning Making and Design Frames in interdisciplinary teams. The overall purpose is to understand how design and design thinking drives innovation, and to understand the strengths, weaknesses and challenges of this approach for various organizations and companies. The academic fields include: Design research, Design- and Innovation Management.

With the focus on linking the purpose of projects, meaning of products, services and strategies with actions and principles, the design driven approach to innovation is of interest to many companies not previously using design to drive the innovation processes. Research projects includes topics such as implementation of design driven innovation in organizations developing new services and products. We are working with companies that expressed interest in becoming more agile and design oriented in their innovation strategy and development processes or are looking to improve their innovation capacity through a design driven staging of collaboration between internal and external stakeholders in large companies.