Design Thinking in Practice: How Practitioners Navigate the Transition from Early Exploration to Implementation

Abstract

Design thinking has become a widely adopted approach to innovation management, with strong empirical support for its effectiveness at the front end of innovation. Yet many design thinking projects generate promising concepts that never reach sustained implementation. This thesis explores how organisations that adopt design thinking navigate the transition from early exploration to implementation, and what conditions enable or hinder that process. The study draws on semi-structured interviews with design and innovation practitioners across Swedish and Norwegian public and private sector organisations. Data were analysed using the Gioia methodology, moving inductively from practitioner accounts toward theoretical constructs. Four findings emerge. First, practitioners consistently distance themselves from the label "design thinking" as a strategic decision about the political conditions surrounding their work. Second, the exploration-to-implementation gap appears to be structural rather than methodological: the conditions determining implementation success are largely established before the design process begins, and appear largely indifferent to design quality. Third, practitioners have independently developed a coherent set of bridging strategies, including parallel implementation planning, internal champion building, and sceptic-to-advocate conversion, that work by changing the political and relational conditions surrounding a project. Fourth, organisational and leadership conditions, particularly industry heritage as an inherited antecedent and the internal empathy deficit in design practice, shape what implementation becomes possible. The study contributes to the design thinking literature by challenging the assumption that human-centred design work carries structural implementation advantages, introducing industry heritage as a theoretically distinct antecedent category, and identifying bridging strategies as a body of practitioner knowledge not yet captured in existing frameworks.