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The ability to function effectively across national and cultural boundaries is a critical challenge faced by companies in the increasingly global economy. Idean, a Finnish design agency with a strong international presence, offers one example of a pathway to globalizing design services. Growth requires learning along the way, adapting plans and practices.

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In engineering-driven organizations, designers often find themselves increasing design awareness amongst developers, selling the relevance of user research to management, or facilitating design workshops for product managers. Designers go beyond doing design work, and act as change agents creating more design-friendly working environments. Sharing showcases and offering opportunities for first-hand experience help to get the message across.

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The process of a professional group gaining a mandate and adopting their practice to an organization includes a variety of complementary actions. Introducing and adopting a practice simultaneously on multiple levels of an organization enhances the fit of the practice and provides opportunities to gain a mandate. Thus, the role of a change agent take shape in multiple ways in such contexts.

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I recently defended my PhD thesis looking into how practitoners with little or no experience on creative problem-solving practices approach ambigious problems and, on the other hand, how this type of work should be supported. My research got started at the Design Factory and the data was gathered from Design Factory-based industry project courses and from companies involved in research projects based at DF. Below is the transcript of the introductory lecture I gave at my defence. 

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