Towards Software Support for Situation-specific Cross-organizational Design Thinking Processes

To deal with uncertain user needs and the development of cross-organizational solutions, Design Thinking (DT) processes are one general problem-solving approach. However, DTs actual implementation within organizations depends highly on the situation (e.g., goal to achieve) which affects the conducted process itself (e.g., different tasks to conduct), the used places (e.g., different visualization on whiteboards), and the involved people (e.g., different stakeholders for specific tasks). Currently, the situation needs to be covered manually by the DT moderator during the process construction and is insufficiently addressed by existing software tools during execution. Therefore, we propose a design science study to develop abstract design knowledge and a specific software tool for supporting situation-specific DT processes based on the application domain on cross-organizational development of business models for business ecosystems. Within this workshop paper, we provide preliminary design principles together with a software tool based on the practical experience in existing research projects.CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Collaborative and social computing.