May I have your attention - Designers’ issue selling processes in design integration

The benefits of design for innovation and organizations are becoming well-documented. However, integrating design in technology-driven companies remains challenging. While past research has focused on how design can be organized and supported on an organizational level, we adopt an attention-based view to design integration to explore the actor-level issue selling actions through which design is sought to be integrated into the daily operational decision-making and repertoire of technology organizations. Examining the issue selling strategies of the design workforce at a large, international technology company, we identify three interconnected genres of issue-selling process strategies – seeding, involving, and funneling. The study shows how these process strategy genres are applied in parallel and sequences, distributed across actors and time in seeking to gain and sustain attention to design across the company. As such, the results contribute to understanding collective pathways to integrating new approaches like design into dispersed organizational decision-making in technology organizations. • Designers initiate and sustain attention to design through issue selling. • They use three different, interconnected issue selling strategy process genres. • Seeding, involving and funneling strategies are combined to broaden attention. • Collective efforts through multiple pathways contribute to design integration.