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Abstract
Design demands achieving a balance between creative and routine activities. This balance is vital to ensure the survival and prosperity of design entrepreneurs’ businesses. This paper examines how design entrepreneurs enact individual ambidexterity to carry out both creative (exploration) and routine (exploitation) activities in their own businesses. Empirically, it draws on interviews with 23 designers who founded micro businesses, where they carry out design, production, marketing, and sales activities. Our findings show that individual ambidexterity was smoothly enacted to handle design and production tasks in an intertwined fashion, thus reaching a compromise between exploration and exploitation, while it was hindered by the contradiction between ‘the sales mindset’ and ‘the creative mindset’ designers encountered when faced with marketing activities. On the other hand, ‘the business mindset’, which primarily belongs to the non-creatives’ world, was considered as valuable and essential for a creative professional choosing an entrepreneurial career path.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the designers who shared their invaluable experiences with us through the interviews. We would also like to thank PhD students Zeliha Didem Yanpar Uzun and Nimet Başar Kesdi, who took part in the project team to conduct and transcribe the interviews that constituted the empirical basis of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Pınar Kaygan
Pınar Kaygan is Head Researcher in Design at the Art Academy of Latvia. She received her PhD from Sheffield University in the UK. Her research and teaching focus on interdisciplinary design collaborations, gender and technology relations in design, and new forms of work and employment in design. She has published several journal articles on design practice and education in prominent journals such as The Design Journal, Design and Culture, and International Journal of Technology and Design Education. She has been part of the editorial team of Design and Culture in the role of Associate Editor since 2019.
S. Nazlı Wasti
S. Nazlı Wasti is a Professor at the Middle East Technical University (METU), Department of Business Administration. She received her MS and PhD degrees in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her research interests are interorganizational trust, trust repair, innovation management, and buyer-supplier relations. Her research has appeared in journals such as Journal of International Business Studies, Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Business Research, Thunderbird International Business Review, and Group and Organization Management. She has been serving on the review board of the Journal of Trust Research since 2013. She was the local director of the METU Confucius Institute between 2011 and 2018 and the national representative of the European Academy of Management between 2017 and 2020. She has been the local coordinator for a number of international and national projects, including an Erasmus + Strategic Partnership project on developing the case method in management education in Turkish universities.
İrem Dilek Alptekin
İrem Dilek Alptekin received her BID, M.Sc and PhD degrees from Middle East Technical University, Department of Industrial Design. Her research interests include design practice and its transformation, and the relationship of designers with experts from other disciplines in design-related tasks. Currently, she is giving product design studio, design practice, and design management courses at TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey.