co-design |verbe (transitive)| \ˌkəʊdɪˈzaɪn\

Literally: "to design jointly" (Collins English Dictionary)

Through co-design, individuals go through an iterative process of inquiry and co-creation in which they tap on their diverse set of knowledge, experiences, and insights to create an artifact - be it conceptual or material - that participates in solving their common problem [Détienne 2006; Kleinsmann 2006; Steen 2013].

As today’s business reality is increasingly characterized by ill-defined, complex, and intangible management problems, scholars and thought leaders have called for a designerly approach to management (Boland et al. 2008; Dunne et al. 2006; Jelinek et al. 2008). Following this movement, co-design (or collaborative design) has recently emerged as an approach to solve an increasing number of collaborative management problems such as strategic management, information systems development, new products or services, and innovation.

This approach has several benefits to address collaborative management problems: it allows teams to make use of their diversity to generate better ideas, it promotes a trial-and-error approach to solving the problem, and it increases the level of commitment and satisfaction with the solution.

I believe in the generation of a “toolbox” to help management teams co-design solutions mostly but not exclusively to ill-structured problems. This toolbox could address a variety of problems in which each problem would have a tool dedicated to it. It would come in support whenever teams face specific problems. In the case of well-structured problems, there already exists classical, rational decision making tools. But "design thinking" approaches are becoming increasingly popular even for well-structured problems. Thus, we could also imagine a new generation of tools for these types of problems, even though it is less needed.

Startup Identity Communication

Paul Leivand says « Companies’ purpose and mission statements often don’t help, being as vague as “we want to be the company of choice for our customers” or “we are committed to delivering the highest quality and widest selection to our customers. We know, however, that companies with a strong identity — the kind that is backed up by the ability to deliver their promise — tend to win. In a recent survey of 720 executives, companies that were seen as having a stronger identity outperformed others by 25% (in terms of average annual TSR between 2010 and 2013) »

How to construct a collaborative tool to model a Startup Brand Identity ? -- This is the current project on which I am working and will update this page with the advances of that project.