Graduation Year
2026
Date of Defense
4-17-2026
Degree Name
Executive Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA)
Department
Charles F. Dolan School of Business
Document Type
Dissertation
First Advisor
Carl Scheraga
Abstract
Sustainability-focused innovation presents organizations with complex, interdependent challenges commonly characterized as wicked problems, involving ambiguity, competing stakeholder priorities, and resistance to definitive solutions. Design Thinking has been widely promoted as a human-centered, iterative approach well suited to these conditions. However, despite its broad adoption across industries, a persistent gap remains between the theoretical promise of design thinking and its practical enactment within organizational contexts. Existing measurement approaches primarily assess design thinking as an individual mindset or set of dispositions, offering limited insight into how it is operationalized as an organizational capability, particularly in sustainability-oriented environments. This study addresses this gap through the development and pilot evaluation of the Extended Design Thinking Mindset Scale (EDTMS), a 32-item instrument designed to measure enacted design thinking behaviors within professional organizational settings. Grounded in established scale de-velopment methodology and derived from the Design Thinking Mindset Scale (Dosi et al., 2018), the EDTMS extends prior work by reorienting measurement toward observable behaviors and firm-level integration. The instrument is structured across three dimensions Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.
A pilot study was conducted with experienced professional practitioners across diverse industries, organizational sizes, and roles. The survey instrument incorporated the EDTMS, a Wicked Problems scale, sustainability engagement indicators, and measures of design thinking operationalization at the firm level. Results revealed a consistent descending pattern across the three subscales, indicating stronger adoption of early-stage design thinking practices relative to organizational execution and integration. Exploratory analysis further suggests that gaps between individual capability and firm-level operationalization reflect structural and managerial constraints rather than individual limitations.
This research contributes to the literature by introducing a novel instrument that captures design thinking as an enacted organizational behavior with potential application in the firm environment, as well advancing empirical understanding of its role in sustainability-oriented innovation and providing a foundation for future scale validation and hypothesis-driven research.