Towards Situation-specific Software Support for Cross-organizational Design Thinking Processes

Due to the increasing influences of a VUCA world, design thinking workshops have been established as a standard technique to build solutions according to uncertain customer needs. Concerning the ongoing pandemic and rising development of solutions across organizations, more and more workshops were conducted online with software support. However, existing software tools insufficiently address the different workshop situations in terms of the process (i.e., fixed tasks to conduct), the place (e.g., static online whiteboards), and people (i.e., synchronous working of all stakeholders). Therefore, we propose a design science study to develop a situation-specific software support that can be configured with flexible development processes, different places, and task-related people. Based on practical experience in existing research projects, we derive the initial design requirements and map them to a set of design principles. Out of that, we design a concept with its implementation as a software tool and point out open challenges.