The Nexus of Design Thinking and Intrapreneurship: Insights from a large-scale empirical assessment

Abstract

Although the nexus of Design Thinking (DT) and corporate entrepreneurship being heralded as promising, the concrete compositional architecture of how DT manifests in practice has received limited scholarly attention. Drawing on the argument that DT can facilitate intrapreneurial innovation by enabling effective cognition, we developed a multidimensional assessment model that measures DT for intrapreneurial innovation in an organizational context and applied it via an online survey to 547 organizations of different sizes and industries. An analysis of the dimensional and sub-dimensional values obtained from the quantitative survey data in general, and concerning industry and firm size types in detail, enriches our understanding of DT’s manifestation in practice. We provide practitioners with a useful tool to assess, benchmark, plan, analyze, and communicate the use of DT for intrapreneurial innovation, and guide future DT and entrepreneurship researchers seeking practitioner-relevant insights with nine propositions derived from our observations.