Narrative in design and business: a literature review and research agenda for the future

This paper presents a systematic cross-disciplinary literature review of narrative and storytelling in design and business studies. Although narrative has attracted attention in both design studies, which emphasises narrative’s role in the design process, and business studies, including innovation processes, there is still no research bridging the interdisciplinary gap. First, this review underlines established and emerging research topics on narrative in each field respectively. Within design studies, extant research was synthesised into three main areas: narrative as competency, narrative as process, and narrative as artifact.. In business studies, the discussions of narratives in the four areas: narrative in organizational practices, narrative in strategic management, narrative in innovation process, and narrative in entrepreneurship were reviewed and organized in an integrated manner. Second, the authors highlight avenues for further research at the intersection of the two disciplines by creating a common linguistic framework. The authors argue that design narratives have the potential to contribute to different management issues, such as organisational and managerial sensemaking, strategic change/strategy-as-practice, innovation processes, and entrepreneurial identity and legitimacy building. It is revealed that core traits of narrative (i.e. abduction, empathy cultivation, and temporal work) are common research agendas between design and business studies.