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In the last few years, design thinking has emerged as an effective method of innovation in business management. It is a creative human-centered, experimental and interdisciplinary approach, which gives managers the opportunity to generate radical new ideas adapted to their users’ needs. More recently, this method has been adopted in other fields, such as the public, the healthcare and the third sectors. The diffusion of this method is now reaching also social enterprises, i.e. organisations that combine economic activity and social purposes to create valuable social impact for communities. Indeed, design thinking could be a promising approach to improve their long-term sustainability through innovation.
The purpose of this thesis is to explore the potential of design thinking for social enterprises from the perspective of social entrepreneurs. Its guiding research question is: “how social entrepreneurs perceive the added value of design thinking for their organisation?”. Our hypothesis is that design thinking may provide added value regarding the social mission, the financial sustainability and the competitiveness of social enterprises. This study follows a qualitative research approach: it was conducted through interviews and online questionnaires with a series of social entrepreneurs in Scotland. They all participated to the “Boost by Design” programme in February/March 2017 developed by “Creative Dundee”. This project introduced design thinking methods to 13 social enterprises through participatory workshops. These interviews were completed with observation of the programme implementation during a traineeship at “Creative Dundee” in the same period.
The findings of our enquiry show that social entrepreneurs consider that design thinking is both accessible and useful. It enables them to be more creative and make them realise their users are a resource for improvement and innovation in their organisation. Hence, these results support the hypothesis that design thinking could help social enterprises to become more sustainable in the long term, especially considering their social mission, their financial sustainability and their competitiveness. The thesis proposes a model that summarizes the main results and thus contributes to better understand the potential of design thinking for social enterprises, while highlighting the new avenues for further research.

social entrepreneur --- social enterprise --- design thinking --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Gestion de l'entreprise & théorie des organisations