Creating Organisational Knowledge Through Strategic Business Model Design

Innovation requires teams to create knowledge through integrating insights from different domains. However, the innovative power that interdisciplinary approaches bring can also increase complexity. Consequently, collaboration is required to support design activity. I take the position that while Horst Rittel’s argumentative approach provides a crucial point of departure for understanding collaborative design, the tools and methods developed within this research stream have remained focused on capturing design decisions to act as a memory aid. In contrast, I argue that the argumentative approach to design should aim to create organisational knowledge through critical inquiry.
Drawing on insights from a recent empirical study of interdisciplinary collaborative design activity in industry, this paper highlights the essential role of organisational knowledge creation within collaborative design activity. I show that the organisational knowledge creation cycle can be usefully supported at a strategic level through business model design. However, business model design has historically been undertaken as a tool to represent structure rather than as technique for critical inquiry and investigation. In this paper I show that recasting business model design through a collaborative argumentative approach presents a new technique for designers to create knowledge at the strategic level.