Expanding the business developer's toolbox

Expanding the business developer's toolbox

This two year project focus on one of the core properties in co-design: converging different interests in the design to driving forces for the co-design. To co-design (samskapa) (Forsgren 1998) is to bring together different stakeholders and through a collaborative effort turn a vision into a result. Olausson& Haraldsson (2005) presents strategies for co-design and Rittgen (2007) introduces a tool (COMA) to support the efforts that co-design comprises. Hjalmarsson (forth.) points out that in spite of these theoretical contributions business modelers still lacks sufficient understanding and support in order to assess and converge the interests that participants have during the modeling session into driving forces for the co-design. Building on the notions of toolboxes for business modeling (Hägerfors 1995; Nilsson 1999), the Interest Group Model (Nilsson 1995) and the concept of role-taking (Mead 1956) this project has as purpose to investigate how modelers act when this person assess and converge the interests that different participants has in modeling into driving forces for co-design. This purpose acts as a driving force to reach lessons about how a modeler continually re-assess the interests in collaboration and turn them into driving forces for the co-design work. With this results as a base the project also has the aim to elaborate on how a tool could support the modeler in his or her continually re-assessment of interests in the co-design process. The practical impact of the project is constituted by contextual understanding about how a tool for collaborative modeling could be used as a mean to facilitate modelers when they assess and converge different interests in co-design. Pragmatic knowledge will be produced for the further development of tools and frameworks for co-design oriented modeling. As the project is anchored in COMA the level of practical impact is viewed as high. Professional partners in the project are InnovationLab and SIGMA.