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Lateral thinking is an organization-wide approach to scanning for new inputs, materials, influences, and product technologies currently being applied in one field that can offer new product ideas in another. This concept relates to environmental scanning, organizational assimilation, and application, along with absorptive capacity. Lateral thinking could be described as being sensitive to more social influences, casting a wider net, considering more things in different ways, and absorbing a range of inputs from areas such as fashion, auto racing, food, movies. Firms practicing this approach are sensitive to the possibility that new technologies and radical innovations often arrive from outside normal sources. As Jim Olver points out in his essay in this volume, “Tackling wicked problems requires the ability to examine situations from multiple and novel perspectives, to empathize, to engage in lateral thinking.” This is often what is happening with interdisciplinary approaches – ideas in another field are brought in to enrich one's own discipline.

Brent B. Allred is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and International Business at The College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, VA. He earned his Ph.D. in Strategic Management/International Business at The Pennsylvania State University. His current research interests are in technology sourcing and patent rights. He has published in various journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, Management International Review, the Journal of International Management, Academy of Management Executive, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

This chapter outlines the context behind the “Designing Empowerment” initiative at the Industrial Design program at Virginia Tech. It makes a case for using design thinking and innovation as a catalyst for positive change in our society. With more than 4 billion of us living below poverty line, how do we even begin to make a sense of the challenges faced by majority of humans? What are the design opportunities, if there are any, and how do we go about creating a set of guidelines that can be used to do exploratory research and create compelling solutions? The chapter offers examples of initiatives that have worked, provides evidence of their effectiveness, and presents an argument for using design thinking and innovation as a tool to address some of the most pressing issues: alleviating poverty, providing better education, and improving basic health services for all human beings.

Business, government, and society are being rocked by disruptive global change. The challenges facing international marketers as boundary spanners – and more generally, all managers and leaders – are getting more complex, ambiguous, and unprecedented. The world that they must navigate is increasingly filled with “wicked problems” (Rittel & Weber, 1973) that defy the closed, analytical approaches that characterize typical management education. Addressing the problem requires a new paradigm that augments – and perhaps in some areas, supplants – the traditional business education.

Styling is plagued by prejudice in the literature on the management of design – making it a taboo to talk about styling and designers as stylists. At the same time, the ability of designers to shape the look and feel of products still represents the most defining work of designers. However, reduced to superficial changes in form, styling has been misrepresented as simplistic decoration that is of limited strategic interest for managers of design, especially when compared to the more immaterial (processual) qualities that the discipline has to offer.

In this chapter, we question the validity of the conceptualization above, arguing for a renewed interest in the work of designers as stylists. Building on a general reassessment of style in art and design, we appropriate Ackerman's (1962) work on style for studies on styling and the management of design. In doing so, we propose that styling relates to the problem-solving activities of companies, in which designers create and shape solutions and their expressions. By defining styling along these lines, we account for the ‘‘everyday’’ view that designers (as stylists) shape the look and feel of products, but we no longer disregard the central concern of designers to integrate their decisions on form and function when shaping the look and feel of new products in practice.