This article explores the role of strategic ambiguity as a management practice, as used in SENSEable City Lab - a R & D-oriented lab located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Although literature has already explored strategic ambiguity in various organizational settings, studies focusing on how academic institutions use strategic ambiguity in the context of R & D are quite sparse. The article aims at filling this gap by reporting on a study conducted by the author across 2011 and 2014 in a R & D-oriented academic lab and reflecting on the potential of strategic ambiguity as an effective dialogic strategy to appreciate differences among internal organization members and with external partners. The article also examines some shortcomings of strategic ambiguity, such as the level of anxiety reported by some members of the lab.

This study investigates the relation between the design activity and entrepreneurial ambition of three academic labs: MIT Senseable City Lab, metaLAB (at) Harvard, and Medea at Malmö University. These labs are positioned at the borderland of academic research, as they operate in connection with external stakeholders (industry, NGOs, government institutions) through, for example, joint strategies of intellectual property management or the creation of start-ups. Various economic and social factors motivate the development of these collaborative spaces including the need for academia to secure alternative sources of funding and the political ambition to incorporate knowledge production into the existing value circuits of the market economy. In these spaces, stakeholders with varying interests, agendas, and power positions interact through what can be conflictual and tense processes. Through the combination of ethnographically inspired methods and a semiotic interpretative framework, the study explores how design practice contributes to value creation in entrepreneurial academic labs. It also focuses on the translation aspect of academic entrepreneurship as emerging from the interrelation of varying and transversal design moves and modes. Spatially dislocated and materially re-articulated within different contexts, the format of the lab actualizes diverse interpretative directions and shifts in meaning relating to multiple stakeholders at certain moments in time. While some moves were pulled toward a linear development process by logic aimed at creating products to be commercialized or publicly showcased, other design moves aimed to preserve complexity and redundancy and retained a high level of openness to external contributions. To varying extents, the three labs also activated and sustained the more ambiguous aspects of design as a translational practice. In a sense, these three academic labs exemplify in-between spaces that, within the context of the design projects studied, articulate a type of translational entrepreneurship which allows multiple stakeholders to retain their divergences while simultaneously building upon their convergences in coordinated action. This translation activity traveled nonlinear routes but was firmly anchored to what was found to be asymmetrical power dynamics and negotiation as well as certain alliances and actively sustained ambiguity.

This paper reflects upon some limitations of Urban Sensing, a EU-funded research project that explores the potential of social media analysis and data visualization as a source of knowledge for participatory urban planning processes. In Urban Sensing we did not only collect users’ contributions related to the context of their use and perception of the city, but all kinds of contributions, such as private comments or conversations with friends that are completely unrelated to urban issues. In most of the contributions collected in our platform, there is no intentionality from the users to post a tweet or check-in at Foursquare as actions to influence urban planning and management processes. Can this lack of intentionality undermine the potential of our platform as a bottom-up component for participatory processes?

Purpose This paper compares two boundary organizations situated in Malmö (Sweden) and oriented towards opening production. Particularly, it looks at how the two organizations tried to establish and communicate their boundaries during their official opening events, which were structured according to the format of Hackathon. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted an ethnographic approach and followed the two events, observing and interacting with organizers and participants. The findings reported here draw upon data collected through direct observation, the authors’ experience as participants, unstructured conversations, email exchanges. Findings This paper analyses the two events in order to show how different cultures of opening production lead to different ways of performing Hackathons and, consequently, how these events affect the process of establishing and communicating the organizational boundaries. Originality/value The paper looks at the potential of events structured according to the format of Hackathon as a way for boundary organizations to position themselves

Simeone and Patelli, building upon their experience as designers and scholars within the Urban Sensing research project, provide materials for scholars and researchers to reflect upon the potential and limitations of social network analysis and data visualization as research methods in urban studies. The chapter starts with a fundamental consideration of the limitations and the distortions inherent in any measurement and technical mediation, considering the particular context of evaluations stemming from quantitative analyses of big data. Simeone and Patelli then map out precursory initiatives and projects that made use of the spatial web to study contemporary cities. Based on concrete empirical examples the methodological limitations and potentialities of Urban Sensing are discussed; which lead to the authors’ reflections on the relevance of sensing the urban through the social web. 

PURPOSE – The purpose of the paper is to study the role of art based practices in driving and shaping the organizing for creativity (organizational creativity). The paper examines how the art based practices driven from improvisational theater could help in conceptualizing and shaping an organizing for creativity (organizational creativity). APPROACH – The paper draws from literature studies to conceptualize organizational creativity as an organizing for creativity. The study forms a framework to understand organizing for creativity and explore how the art based practices of improvisational theater (collective improvisation) could enhance it. ORIGINALITY – This methodology puts in evidence conceptualization of organizational creativity from a novel point of view i.e. from the point of view of organizing. In contrast to ownership and outcome oriented views of creativity, the study aims to understand organizational creativity more as an interaction and interrelated activities of various actors within a system. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS – The outcomes of the application provide a framework for management to understand organizational creativity as creative organizing and to utilize the art based practices, specifically from improvisational theater, to foster it. Hence, organizing for creativity means the utilization of various novel and temporary forms of organizing (for example, such as inter-organizational crowdsourcing) for the achievement of organizational goals.

PURPOSE – Nowadays, thanks to conditions such as agile manufacturing (e.g., using affordable machines like 3-D printers, laser cutters, small CNCs or Pick & Place), low production costs and quick execution cycles, it is easier to turn ideas into a finished product ready to be distributed. Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, created the slogan ‘Deploy or die’ precisely to encourage the researchers of the lab to take these conditions into consideration and to push their projects up to the production stage (and thus beyond the creation of a demo). This paper examines how design is used at the Media Lab to support this ‘deploy or die’ approach and, consequently, to foster entrepreneurial processes fuelled by the research activities of the lab. The paper contends that design activities - such as user research and user testing, rapid and frequent prototyping, visualization techniques, co-design, attention to the brand experience – contribute in igniting and sustaining the ‘deploy or die’ approach. APPROACH – The study is the result of an investigation - also based on ethnographic methods – conducted by the author in the city of Cambridge, MA across 2011 and 2014. The application of an ethnographic approach with the direct involvement of researchers in the field has proven to be a common element of a good number of recent studies on organizations (Czarniawska 2012). ORIGINALITY – The study contributes to the ongoing discussions on how design can support entrepreneurship, with particular reference to the area of academic entrepreneurship. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS –The paper contends that design activities contribute in igniting and sustaining the ‘deploy or die’ approach and, consequently, could be adopted by research organizations to support operations in the area of academic entrepreneurship.

This chapter describes some workshops connected to MAKE, a project fostered by a group of artists and researchers affiliated with Harvard and MIT and a host of global partners, who together created a series of workshops to explore themes such as copyright, privacy, danger, and gender equality.

TESS (Towards European Societal Sustainability) is a three-year research project receiving funding from the European Commission to study the potential for community-led initiatives to help deliver a low carbon, sustainable future. More specifically, TESS is interested in how existing initiatives (e.g., projects working with renewable energy, car sharing, community farming, ...) can be evaluated and supported in order for them to scale up and have wider societal impact. An interactive platform to connect the project stakeholders (researchers, industry, government, NGOs) is one of the key components of TESS. This paper documents the interplay between user-centred design and design management in creating this platform. In particular, the author organized a series of workshops where theoretical approaches and techniques from both user-centred design and design management have been applied to design an early-stage prototype of the interactive platform. The research question behind this paper is: How can design management complement user-centred approaches in the early stages of the design process? The paper will show how adopting a design management approach helped the participants of the workshops in broadening their perspective. In particular, through a design management lens, participants could reflect upon organizational and economic constraints of the project and thus refine their first prototype of the interactive platform for TESS.