Mega infrastructure projects in liberal democracies often encounter significant cost overruns and delays. These challenges arise from tensions between mandated stakeholder engagement and shareholder-focused decision making. Legal frameworks require broad stakeholder involvement, yet investors prioritize cost efficiency, frequently omitting collaboration expenses from initial budgets. This misalignment creates governance traps, leading to prolonged negotiations, inefficiencies, collective action problems, and diminished trust among managers, stakeholders, and investors. This special section of California Management Review examines the dynamics of large-scale stakeholder enfranchisement. This introduction presents a 2 x 2 framework categorizing megaproject governance based on legal mandates for stakeholder inclusion and the degree of shareholder-centric investment decisions. The featured articles propose strategies to enhance stakeholder collaboration and address governance challenges. Together, they suggest that large-scale stakeholder engagement can be effective when organizations enjoy ample resources or strong cooperative norms. In their absence, governance traps may emerge, hindering efficiency and broad-based wealth creation. Alternative social arrangements can be employed to navigate and escape these governance traps.

When many of today’s deepest problems are intractable, how can public, private, and nonprofit actors collaborate to mitigate negative local effects? Given the open-endedness of any collective effort to “chip away” at a grand challenge, these intersectoral collaborations must align the scope of a shared goal with the governance arrangements distributing decision-making authority. By juxtaposing insights from fieldwork on intersectoral collaborations formed to aid local homeless communities in São Paulo (Brazil), California (USA), and Manchester (UK), this research presents four goal-governance alignments to achieve coordinated collective action. To pursue a targeted goal, an organization can set up or join a local structure of centralised ( Partnerships ) or distributed ( Coalitions ) decision-making authority. To pursue broader goals, an organization can evolve into a Mission by engaging simultaneously in multiple, mutually reinforcing local partnerships and coalitions. Or evolve into a Movement by not only adding local structures of collective action, but also adopting a participation architecture to encourage collaboration at scale from third parties outside the organization’s managerial control.

BackgroundStrokes pose a substantial health burden, impacting 1 in 6 people globally. One-tenth of patients will endure a second, often more severe, stroke within a year. Alarmingly, a younger demographic is being affected due to recent lifestyle changes. As fine motor and cognitive issues arise, patient disability as well as the strain on caregivers and health care resources is exacerbated. Contemporary occupational therapy assesses manual dexterity and cognitive functions through object manipulation and pen-and-paper recordings. However, these assessments are typically isolated, which makes it challenging for therapists to comprehensively evaluate specific patient conditions. Furthermore, the reliance on one-on-one training and assessment approaches on manual documentation is inefficient and prone to transcription errors. ObjectiveThis study examines the feasibility of using an interactive electronic pegboard for stroke rehabilitation in clinical settings. MethodsA total of 10 patients with a history of stroke and 10 healthy older individuals were recruited. With a limit of 10 minutes, both groups of participants underwent a series of challenges involving tasks related to manual operation, shape recognition, and color discrimination. All participants underwent the Box and Block Test and the Purdue Pegboard Test to assess manual dexterity, as well as an array of cognitive assessments, including the Trail Making Test and the Mini-Mental Status Examination, which served as a basis to quantify participants’ attention, executive functioning, and cognitive abilities. ResultsThe findings validate the potential application of an interactive electronic pegboard for stroke rehabilitation in clinical contexts. Significant statistical differences (P<.01) were observed across all assessed variables, including age, Box and Block Test results, Purdue Pegboard Test outcomes, Trail Making Test-A scores, and Mini-Mental Status Examination performance, between patients with a history of stroke and their healthy older counterparts. Functional and task testing, along with questionnaire interviews, revealed that patients with a history of stroke demonstrated prolonged completion times and slightly inferior performance. Nonetheless, most patients perceived the prototype as user-friendly and engaging. Thus, in the context of patient rehabilitation interventions or the evaluation of patient cognition, physical functioning, or manual dexterity assessments, the developed pegboard could potentially serve as a valuable tool for hand function, attention, and cognitive rehabilitation, thereby mitigating the burden on health care professionals. ConclusionsHealth care professionals can use digital electronic pegboards not only as a precise one-on-one training tool but also as a flexible system that can be configured for online or offline, single-player or multiplayer use. Through data analysis, a more informed examination of patients’ cognitive and functional issues can be conducted. Importantly, patient records will be fully retained throughout practices, exercises, or tests, and by leveraging the characteristics of big data, patients can receive the most accurate rehabilitation prescriptions, thereby assisting them in obtaining optimal care.

Background As individuals age, the incidence and mortality rates of cerebrovascular accidents significantly rise, leading to fine motor impairments and cognitive deficits that impact daily life. In modern occupational therapy, assessing manual dexterity and cognitive functions typically involves observation of patients interacting with physical objects. However, this pen-and-paper method is not only time-consuming, relying heavily on therapist involvement, but also often inaccurate. Digital assessment methods, therefore, have the potential to increase the accuracy of diagnosis, as well as decrease the workload of health care professionals. Objective This study examined the feasibility of an interactive electronic pegboard for the assessment and rehabilitation of patients with stroke. Methods We explored the pegboard’s clinical applicability by examining the relationship among stages, timing, and difficulty settings, as well as their alignment with patient capabilities. In total, 10 participants used a prototype of the pegboard for functional and task assessments; questionnaire interviews were conducted simultaneously to collect user feedback. Results Patients with stroke consistently required more time to complete tasks than expected, significantly deviating from the initial time frames. Additionally, the participants exhibited a slight reduction in performance levels in both manual dexterity and cognitive abilities. Insights from questionnaire responses revealed that the majority of participants found the prototype interface easy and enjoyable to use, with good functionality. Conclusions This preliminary investigation supports the efficacy of interactive electronic pegboards for the rehabilitation of the hand functions of patients with stroke, as well as training their attentional and cognitive abilities. This digital technology could potentially alleviate the burden of health care workers, positioning it as a valuable and intelligent precision health care tool.

Knowledge communities are critical for spurring innovation. For knowledge communities to develop and thrive, appropriate choices must be made around their geographic locations, as well as their physical and digital infrastructure. This paper explores the role of the materiality of boundary spaces, specifically geography and physical/digital infrastructure, in knowledge communities using startup accelerators as an empirical context through which to examine their development and structure. Based on a multi-case study of seventeen accelerators in the San Francisco Bay Area, we shed light on how to leverage boundary space design to foster knowledge communities. Using the construct of knowledge communities, we identify three accelerator archetypes - (1) knowledge spoke hubs, (2) knowledge centers, and (3) knowledge networks - and describe the distinct roles that boundary space design plays in each. The discovery of these archetypes and the associated boundary space design considerations inform a discussion about the implications for both the knowledge community and startup accelerator literature.

Goal congruence, defined as agreement by all members of a team on a common set of objectives, has been positively associated with team cohesion, team performance and team outcomes, including grades earned. Yet there is little in-depth study at scale and across types of engineering design and innovation classes in higher education that examines the goals students set for their work together. This research explores goal congruence in 857 teams involving 1470 students across 18 classes over four years. To examine goal congruence, we use student assessments of their level of agreement on their goals as well as evaluations of their written goal statements. Machine learning techniques are used to automatically identify goal types and congruence between goals. We find that goal congruence on student teams is relatively low, even when they assess it as high, partly due to variety in the types of goals they identify. We categorize the goals students articulate for their teams into grade-, completion-, teaming-, learning-, problem-, output- and outcome-oriented goals and report variance in the types of goals identified in different pedagogical settings. Our findings have implications for how faculty design their classes, link learning outcomes to team projects and facilitate goal setting on student teams.

Engineering graduates must know how to frame and solve non-routine problems. While design classes explicitly teach problem framing and solving, it is lacking throughout much of the rest of the engineering curriculum and is often relegated to capstone classes at the end of the students' educational experience. This paper explores problem framing and solving through the lens of experiential learning theory. It captures core problem framing and solving approaches from critical, design and systems thinking and concludes with a table of learning outcomes that might be drawn upon in designing an engineering curriculum that more fully develops the problem framing and solving capabilities of its students.

Design thinking is gaining widespread attention in the practitioner and academic literature. Successful implementation has been documented, and its value shown in empirical studies. There is little examination, however, of how design thinking practices fit with other approaches from which firms might choose to frame and solve problems such as agile, lean startup, scientific method, Six Sigma, critical thinking, and systems thinking. By digging into the basic capabilities underlying design thinking, academic researchers might better understand problem framing and solving in general and provide insight for practitioners as to where alternative approaches might be applied.

This is an introduction to the special issue of California Management Review on Design Thinking (DT). This special issue joins the growing body of work exploring the idea of DT and whether DT makes a difference in terms enhancing or augmenting the impact of technology—and, as a result, innovation—in a positive way. We have chosen an interesting, relevant, and useful array of papers that provide different approaches, views, and interpretations of applied design thinking. These articles provide both management and scholarly readers with insights in how DT is used, as well as its impact and usefulness in a variety of contexts.

Business schools around the world are increasingly integrating design thinking into their curricula, which invites definition of a new professional identity for individuals effectively working at the intersection of the two fields. Research is needed, however, to understand what such a profession might entail and in what ways students might best be prepared to enter it. Defining the capabilities that a design thinking business professional will embody requires an understanding of the ways design thinking complements or contradicts more traditional critical thinking approaches applied to business decisions. This chapter adopts a framework grounded in learning theory to describe the four basic capabilities needed to frame and solve problems in practice: observing and noticing; framing and reframing; imagining and designing; and making and experimenting. Using that framework, it unpacks the contributions that design and critical thinking make to the development of each of the capabilities in a business setting and highlights challenges associated with helping business students learn design thinking and how they might use it to complement other approaches to framing and solving business problems.

Designing an innovation strategy in a world of rapid technological change has become increasingly challenging. Some companies are finding that anchoring technology choices in deeper understanding of the value users seek allows them to find a better balance among feasibility, viability, and desirability of potential solutions, and thus create more successful user outcomes. They do so by involving designers earlier in the roadmap development to guide product and technology selection, toward a future vision based on user value and aspirations. In this article, we extend two streams of prior research on technology roadmapping (TRM) and design roadmapping (DRM). First, we identify and compare technology and DRM approaches and their distinct strategic emphases: Technology selection and user value, respectively. Second, we compare two cases of DRM deployment in corporations: Siemens and Air France-KLM. The intent is to provide an in-depth understanding of why and how DRM complements TRM and how DRM facilitates making tradeoffs among strategic goals to more comprehensively address the feasibility, viability, and desirability of new product and service designs. We find that DRM embeds a deep understanding of current and future user needs, linking user-centered design and technology selection to strategy in practice.

Design education continues to interest students across universities today. Students choose among myriad of programs that provide pathways to becoming a professional designer, but do so through varied courses of study that depend upon factors such as the school, the program's home discipline, the student population, and the intended professional design field. When creating a multidisciplinary design certificate at the University of California, Berkeley that would allow students to take design courses from multiple fields including business, engineering, humanities and environmental design, faculty from the disciplines engaged in a series of discussions about programmatic learning outcomes. As a result, a question arose about the extent to which disciplinary perspective influences design pedagogy and the resulting training provided to the student. This paper examines learning outcomes associated with design programs anchored in four disciplines and assesses similarities and differences amongst them. In doing so, it aims to uncover ways in which disciplinary focus influences programmatic goals and to identify implications of differences among them for the construction of multidisciplinary design programs.

There is a long history of conversations about integrating business and arts-based learning, but they are taking on more urgency today as technology-induced change and global interconnectivity are altering how humans learn, create, and construct new knowledge in unprecedented ways. However, there is much still to be learned about how the disciplines might be integrated and in what ways they can jointly serve the development not only of university students, but of how professional practice itself is defined. Over the past three years, faculty from the Theater and Dance Performance Studies, Art Practice, and Business disciplines at UC Berkeley have collaborated to create a course, Collaborative Innovation, that explores both collaboration and innovation at the intersection of these three fields. This paper presents a framework for a genuinely integrated interdisciplinary class that interweaves personal development and growth with problem framing and solving skills, and diverse-team participation and leadership. Quotes from student reflection papers bring alive the transformational experiences students went through in this course. The integration of socially engaged art, business, and theater/performance through collaborative teamwork tackling important and challenging social problems opens unexpected potential for student development as future contributors to society.