Turning rejection into adoption: enhancing the uptake of externally developed design proposals through boundary spanning

Public organizations increasingly apply design approaches from the creative disciplines. Generally, they do this in isolation from their daily activities. Consequently, the resulting design proposals are rarely adopted. Using Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis on 14 cases, we investigated whether team boundary spanning activities – i.e. representation, coordination of task performance, general information search - enhance adoption. Adoption occurs when representation and coordination of task performance are combined. Vice versa, adoption fails when coordination of task performance is absent. Four specific team boundary spanning activities seem particularly effective: building partnerships, organizing events, branding the project, and jointly reframing the issue at hand.