Prof. Richard J. Boland
Case Western Reserve University

Professor Boland is Professor of Information Systems and Professor of Accountancy at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. His research emphasizes interpretive studies of how individuals experience the design, implemention and use of information systems in organizations.

Prior to joining the Weatherhead School in 1989, he was Professor of Accounting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has been a visiting Professor at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and at the Gothenburg School of Economics, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Some representative publications include:

• "The Process and Product of System Design", (Management Science 1978);
• "Accounting in Organizations: Toward a Union of Rational and Natural Perspectives", (Accounting, Organizations and Society 1983);
• "Sense Making of Accounting Data", (Management Science, 1986);
• "The Experience of System Design: A Hermeneutic of Organizational Action", (Scandinavian Management Review 1989);
• "Accounting and the Interpretive Act", (Accounting, Organizations and Society);
• "Perspective Making and Perspective Taking in Communities of Knowing", (Organization Science 1995);
• "Why Sharted Meanings Have No Place in Structuration Theory", (Accounting, Organizations and Society, 1996; and
• "Knowledge Representation and Knowledge Transfer", (Academy of Management Journal 2001)
  

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Design and Innovation: a Study of Entrepreneurs

Design thinking is a unique mind set, distinct from the calculative rationality often ascribed to and expected of organization leaders. It is a mind set that orients the agency of an individual as they strive to transform a set of existing conditions into more desirable ones. Design thinking is at the heart of innovations that are lasting and productive, and is especially evident in entrepreneurs. In this talk I will report on a study of five entrepreneurs and the forms of design thinking that are evident in their day to day entrepreneurial behavior. I argue that these entrepreneurial design thinkers can serve as role models for a mind set adoptable by any manager who aspires to make the world a better place in both a social and economic sense.