Imperial College London

DrIleanaStigliani

Business School

Associate Professor of Design and Innovation
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 9228i.stigliani

 
 
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Location

 

298Business School BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Publication Type
Year
to

41 results found

Magistretti S, Bianchi M, Calabretta G, Candi M, DellEra C, Stigliani I, Verganti Ret al., 2022, Framing the multifaceted nature of design thinking in addressing different innovation purposes, Long Range Planning, Vol: 55, ISSN: 0024-6301

Scholars and practitioners acknowledge the role of design, and specifically design thinking, as a driver of innovation and change. Design thinking is gaining attention in the business community beyond the traditional product innovation realm and is increasingly promoted as an engine for the creation of novel user experiences, new businesses, strategic transformation, organizational and cultural change. Is it reasonable to assume that the same set of practices fits such a broad range of applications equally well? This study addresses how design thinking applications are differently framed when addressing diverse innovation purposes. Specifically, we compare two purposes: innovation of solutions, encompassing traditional product and service development projects, and innovation of direction, encompassing strategic and organizational renewal projects. Based on data collected from 146 design thinking projects conducted by European consulting firms we investigate the relationships between the design thinking practices adopted and the value generated by the projects. We then analyze how these relationships vary depending on the purpose of the innovation project, namely whether focused on innovating solutions or direction. The results show that different purposes indeed call for different practices. In projects aimed at innovating solutions, market value is positively related to capturing current user needs and envisioning future society. Conversely, in projects aimed at innovating direction, market value is positively related to challenging current assumptions.

Journal article

Baldessarelli G, Stigliani I, Elsbach K, 2022, The aesthetic dimension of organizing: a review and research agenda, The Academy of Management Annals, Vol: 10, ISSN: 1941-6067

Organizational aesthetics comprises a way of understanding organizational life based on immediate sensory reactions (i.e., sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) to the material components of organizing (e.g., artifacts, physical settings, and material practices). Despite the growing interest in the topic, however, research is fragmented across management areas. To advance scholarly knowledge in this field, we reviewed the empirical work dealing with aesthetics. Our review yields two major insights. First, we identify three perspectives on the role of aesthetics. Scholars have treated aesthetics as (1) a directed stimulus (that elicits product evaluation and work organization), (2) a knowledge tool (that is entwined with creative work and everyday tasks), or (3) an open-ended outcome (that serves as a personal experience). Second, we find that each perspective highlights emotional and cognitive mechanisms through which aesthetics is implicated in organizing. Building on these two insights, our review offers an integrative framework that provides a comprehensive picture of the state of the field, illuminating the work of aesthetics in and around organizations and providing avenues for future studies.

Journal article

Stigliani I, 2021, Following up on “A Letter to the Male ‘Good Apples’”, Journal of Management Inquiry, Vol: 30, Pages: 469-471, ISSN: 1056-4926

Drawing on the Letter to the Male “Good Apples” recently appeared in this section, my letter has a twofold aim: to provoke all the Male “Good Apples” in academia and to offer them an olive branch. As I provide them with a few practical suggestions, I hope to illuminate their way forward to truly “getting it”. It’s time to stop talking a good game and to start playing a better game.

Journal article

Stigliani I, 2020, Navigating an academic maze: experiences of an international female scholar, Journal of Management Inquiry, Vol: 29, Pages: 360-363, ISSN: 1056-4926

Academia is a world filled with bright people searching for explanations for phenomena around us, and developing and testing new theories to explain the hows and whys of our experience. It is a world defined by a drive to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and is ostensibly characterized by intellectual enlightenment and relentless progress. But is academia truly progressive? Perhaps for some of us. For others, however, it is still a world where many people struggle to be seen, to be heard, and to succeed—especially if you are in the minority (e.g., you are female, international, a person of color, or have other features that put you in a minority category). In this essay, I share some of my personal experiences as an international female academic, with the hope that my challenges—and the ways I work to overcome them—will resonate with other people in the margins of our presumably progressive field.

Journal article

Elsbach K, Stigliani I, 2019, New information technology and implicit bias, Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol: 33, Pages: 185-206, ISSN: 1558-9080

In this paper, we perform an extensive review of relatively recent empirical research that relates new information technology to biased thinking. Based on this review, we develop a framework that suggests a number of implicit associations (i.e., unconscious linkages between phenomena, such as “women are nurturing”) that relate new information technology to a variety of attitudes held by both organizational decision makers and average users of such information technology (e.g., “new information technology is superior to older information technology”). In turn, our framework proposes a set of three underlying beliefs about new information technology (i.e., new information technology is mysterious, non-human, and complex) that may underlie the implicit attitudes and biased thinking we identified. These underlying beliefs suggest that biases related to new information technology are distinct, in important ways, from most interpersonal biases studied in organizations. Given these findings, we suggest an agenda for future research that may enhance our ability to understand and mitigate biases related to new information technology in organizational settings.

Journal article

Stigliani I, Elsbach KD, 2018, Identity co-formation in an emerging industry: forging organizational distinctiveness and industry coherence through sensemaking and sensegiving, Journal of Management Studies, Vol: 55, Pages: 1323-1355, ISSN: 0022-2380

We inductively studied the sensemaking and sensegiving processes used by industry founders in the co‐formation of organizational and industry identities in the emerging industry of Service Design. Our findings illustrate how the sensemaking and sensegiving processes that revolved around the new “Service Design” label allowed the two sets of industry founders to forge both distinctive organizational identities and a coherent industry identity. The new label was, thus, used as a central “carrier” for both holding meanings (in terms of distinctive principles and common practices) developed through sensemaking, and for transferring these meanings respectively to organizational and industry identities through sensegiving. These insights illuminate how industry founders can address the tension between organizational distinctiveness and industry coherence in emerging industries, and have important implications for theory and future research on identity co‐formation and its underlying sensemaking and sensegiving processes.

Journal article

Ravasi D, Rindova V, Stigliani I, 2018, The stuff of legend: history, material memory and the temporality of identity construction, Academy of Management Journal, Vol: 62, Pages: 1523-1555, ISSN: 0001-4273

A growing body of research on how organizations engage with their histories has shown that organizational members revisit history in the light of present-day concerns to inspire or legitimate future courses of action. Studies of the processes through which organizational history is brought to bear on the present and future, however, remain rare. To uncover the processes and practices through which organizational members systematically engage with history, we investigated the uses of four corporate museums established by Italian manufacturers of consumer goods Alessi, Alfa Romeo, Ducati and Piaggio. We identified three distinct forms of engagement, reflecting different perspectives on the relationship between history and identity, involved different cognitive processes and emotional responses, and influenced organizational action in different ways. Our theoretical insights have significant implications not only for understanding the use of history in organizations, but also for research on organizational identity and organizational memory.

Journal article

Elsbach K, Stigliani I, 2018, Design thinking and organizational culture: a review and framework for future research, Journal of Management, Vol: 44, Pages: 2274-2306, ISSN: 0149-2063

Design thinking comprises an approach to problem solving that uses tools traditionally utilized by designers of commercial products, processes, and environments (e.g., designing a new car or the layout of a new airport). While design thinking was originally introduced as an approach that would work best when infused into the culture of an organization, most early studies of design thinking focused on identifying the specific tools and methods that might be used to solve management problems. Only recently have researchers examined how the implementation of design thinking might relate to organizational-level constructs, such as organizational culture. In this review, we examine empirical research (mostly from the past decade) that relates the practice of design thinking to the development of culture in organizations. Through this review, we identify how the use of specific design thinking tools supports the development of specific organizational cultures and vice versa. In addition, we identify how using design thinking tools produces emotional experiences and physical artifacts that help users to understand why and how specific cultures support the effective use of specific tools. Together, our review findings suggest that the experiential nature of design thinking tools and cultures (i.e., that they require people to actively engage in hands-on work) allows them to support one another. On the basis of this insight, we develop a general framework for organizing design thinking research and identify a number of avenues for future research that might advance our understanding of design thinking in organizational contexts.

Journal article

Stigliani I, Ravasi D, 2018, The shaping of form: exploring designers’ use of aesthetic knowledge, Organization Studies, Vol: 39, Pages: 747-784, ISSN: 1741-3044

Research on design and designers has emphasized the tacit nature of the aesthetic knowledge that these professionals draw upon to make decisions about formal properties of objects and spaces, but is less clear about how design teams address the difficulties associated with expressing and sharing this type of knowledge. A ten-month ethnography in a design consultancy revealed a range of multimodal and cross-modal ways in which members of a design team compensate their imperfect capacity of articulating verbally their aesthetic knowledge in order to enable creative collaboration. In so doing, our study offers two main contributions. It illuminates the interplay between designers’ aesthetic experiences, visceral responses and intuitive cognitive processes that enable designers to draw upon their aesthetic knowledge to support the collective accomplishment of their task, and provides an interpretation of the design process as a form of ‘creative’ intuition driven by emotional reactions to environmental stimuli and emerging formal solutions.

Journal article

Fayard AL, Stigliani I, Bechky BA, 2017, How nascent occupations construct a mandate: the case of service designers' ethos, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol: 62, Pages: 270-303, ISSN: 1930-3815

In this paper, we study the way that nascent occupations constructing an occupational mandate invoke not only skills and expertise or a new technology to distinguish themselves from other occupations, but also their values. We studied service design, an emerging occupation whose practitioners aim to understand customers and help organizations develop new or improved services and customer experiences, translate those into feasible solutions, and implement them. Practitioners enacted their values in their daily work activities through a set of material practices, such as shadowing customers or front-line staff, conducting interviews in the service context, or creating “journey maps” of a service user’s experience. The role of values in the construction of an occupational mandate is particularly salient for occupations such as service design, which cannot solely rely on skills and technical expertise as sources of differentiation. We show how service designers differentiated themselves from other competing occupations by highlighting how their values make their work practices unique. Both values and work practices, what service designers call their ethos, were essential to enable service designers to define the proper conduct and modes of thinking characteristic of their occupational mandate.

Journal article

Stigliani I, Ravasi D, 2015, Combining qualitative methods to study collective cognition in organizations, Handbook of Qualitative Organizational Research Innovative Pathways and Ideas, Publisher: Routledge, ISBN: 9781848725096

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art, innovative approaches to qualitative research for organizational scholars.

Book chapter

Elsbach KD, Stigliani I, 2013, Passive "Face Time" in the Professional Workplace, Sociology of Work: An Encyclopaedia, Editors: Smith

Book chapter

Wright M, Stigliani I, 2013, Entrepreneurship and Growth, International Small Business Journal, Vol: 31, Pages: 13-22

Journal article

Stigliani I, Elsbach KD, 2012, The role of category labels in the emergence of new organizational identities: the case of Service Design, Academy of Management Meeting

Conference paper

Ravasi D, Stigliani I, 2012, Product Design: a Framework and Research Agenda for Management Studies, International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol: 14, Pages: 464-488

Journal article

Elsbach KD, Stigliani I, Strout A, 2012, The Building of Employee Distrust: A Case Study of Hewlett-Packard, Organizational Dynamics

Journal article

Stigliani I, Ravasi D, 2012, Organizing Thoughts and Connecting Brains: Material Practices and the Transition from Individual to Group-level Prospective Sensemaking, Academy of Management Journal, Vol: 55, Pages: 1232-1259

Journal article

Stigliani I, Fayard AL, 2011, Enacting occupational identity through sociomaterial practices: the case of service designers, Academy of Management Meeting

Conference paper

Stigliani I, Tether BS, 2011, Building a new field: How an emerging category becomes meaningful and legitimate – The case of Service Design, EGOS

Conference paper

Stigliani I, Ravasi D, 2011, Organizing Thoughts and Connecting Brains: Material Practices and Collective Sensemaking, UC Davis Qualitative Conference

Conference paper

Rindova V, Ravasi D, Stigliani I, 2011, Valuing products as cultural symbols: A conceptual framework and empirical illustration, The worth of goods: Valuation and pricing in the economy, Editors: Beckert, Aspers, Publisher: Oxford University Press

Book chapter

Stigliani I, 2010, The Making of Form: Exploring Aesthetic Knowledge in Product Design, First European Design Management Workshop 2008

Conference paper

Stigliani I, 2010, Artifacts and Creativity: The Role of Artifacts during the Creative Process in a Product Design Firm, Academy of Management Meeting 2008

Conference paper

Stigliani I, Ravasi D, 2010, Organizational artefacts, cultural heritage and identity management, International Conference of the CORPORATE IDENTITY/ASSOCIATIONS 2005

Conference paper

Stigliani I, Ravasi D, 2010, Conditions of success and failure in collaborations between business firms and design consultancies: The designers’ perspective, International conference: DIME - Creative Industries Observatory (CIO) 2008

Conference paper

Stigliani I, Ravasi D, 2010, Organizational artefacts and identity-related processes: a study of corporate museums, EGOS 2006

Conference paper

Stigliani I, Ravasi D, 2010, Organizational artefacts and identity-related processes: a study of corporate museums, Academy of Management Meeting 2006

Conference paper

Stigliani I, 2010, Artifacts and Creativity: a study of product designers, ESF/SCSS Exploratory Workshop: Exploring Symbolic Value Creation in Organizations 2007

Conference paper

Stigliani I, 2010, Design as a field of study, Academy of Management Meeting 2007

Conference paper

Stigliani I, 2010, The Aesthetic Implications of Product Design, Academy of Management Meeting 2010

Conference paper

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