Driving small business social impact and innovation via design thinking and GenAI integration

Purpose This study explores the opportunity to integrate generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) with design thinking in driving social impact and innovation for small businesses. Given the resource constraints often faced by small businesses, design thinking promises an accessible approach to effectively accelerating problem-solving, product development, and process improvement. The emergence of GenAI presents a potential to further enhance these processes. Conceptual approach The study develops a conceptual framework by synthesising the bodies of literature on small business social impact and innovation, design thinking, and GenAI, to identify key constructs and relationships. These insights are integrated into a framework that maps concrete GenAI applications onto design thinking, specifically via its LUMA system approach of ‘looking’, ‘understanding’, and ‘making’ phases. Findings The proposed framework theorises how GenAI can augment design thinking while maintaining a human-centred orientation. It shows how small businesses can accelerate social impact by adopting design thinking and GenAI integration to deepen customer insights, prioritise socially valuable opportunities, and experiment with prototypes prior to scaling. An implementation checklist is also proposed, which translates the framework into actionable guidance for small businesses, alongside a future research agenda outlined around key design thinking phases. Originality The paper advances small business social impact research by shifting attention from firm-level outcomes to design processes through which social value is created. It offers a novel integration of design thinking and GenAI for socially- and innovation-focused small business research. GenAI is positioned as a socially oriented design element rather than purely technology for productivity or efficiency.