The role of design in leveraging sustainability capabilities in SMEs - A case study of the Business Finland sustainability playbook for digital commerce SMEs
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School of Arts, Design and Architecture |
Master's thesis
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Date
2022
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Mcode
Degree programme
Master's Programme in International Design Business Management
Language
en
Pages
90+4
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Abstract
The climate crisis and the related socio-ecological challenges call for systemic transitions where the private sector forms an integral part of the solution. Despite that, due to public scrutiny mainly being focused on large enterprises, the sustainability efforts of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) largely fall short. For successful sustainability integration, businesses are required to shift their purpose and re-align most of their operations management. In addition, it has been suggested that the constant adjustment of business practices plays a key role in the sustainability transition, thus highlighting the need for dynamic capabilities. Nonetheless, there is still a gap in the literature where researchers have stressed the importance of identifying routines that successfully develop businesses’ dynamic capabilities for engaging with sustainability-oriented innovation. This thesis explores the potential of leveraging design skills to establish dynamic capabilities for sustainability in SMEs. This is done through a case study into the Business Finland Sustainability Playbook for Digital Commerce SMEs, which was a design-driven project aiming to make an industry-level push on e-commerce SMEs by making sustainability-related information understandable, tangible, and actionable. The case study methodology consisted of observing the nine separate SMEs participating in the project, conducting six interviews with different stakeholders, and taking notes from all the discussions throughout the development of the Playbook. This study identifies eight roles designers play in creating a connection between the systemic transitions and the reality of SMEs. These are: bringing human centricity to sustainability, balancing multiple stakeholder perspectives and synthesizing different knowledge forms, exploring, inspiring, and nurturing new solutions, facilitating discussions around sustainability, prototyping and iterating, identifying dormant sustainability capabilities of SMEs, producing actionable outcomes, and introducing new methods of thinking to other fields. These eight roles highlighted the overlap between the fields of strategic design and design for sustainability. Furthermore, this study shows how designers, through human centricity and constant iteration, can identify strategies that are most appropriate to support SMEs in sustainability-oriented innovation. Hence, they contribute to SMEs’ dynamic capabilities for sustainability in sensing opportunities, seizing opportunities, and maintaining competitiveness through asset reconfiguration. Finally, this investigation sheds light on designers' changing skill sets when acting as an intermediary between business and sustainability. This implies the suitability of designers for dealing with multidisciplinary challenges and calls for the emergence of design consultancies that apply human-centricity in sustainability transitions.Description
Supervisor
Gaziulusoy, IdilThesis advisor
Falay von Flittner, ZeynepKeywords
SMEs, dynamic capabilities, sustainability-oriented innovation, strategic design, design for sustainability, roles of design