BAR - Brazilian Administration Review

21

Authors: Duygu Keskin, Georges Romme

The methodology of design science (DS) has been emerging as a new form of engaged scholarship in which key managerial and organizational challenges are addressed and solved. These developments have major implications for management education, which has been repeatedly criticized for its lack of relevance to practitioners. However, design science methodology and its implications for management education are still unclear and disputed. Teaching and learning DS thus often suffers from the lack of a consistent methodology. In this respect, teaching DS is very much like mixing oil with water. The purpose of this paper is to compare various taxonomies for DS methodology proposed in the management literature and then develop a consistent taxonomy and integrative framework that may appeal to management students at undergraduate and graduate levels. The proposed framework for DS involves an iterative cycle of exploration, synthesis, creation and evaluation. Design principles arise from, but also connect and inform, these four steps in DS.

23

Authors: Nelson Rogeri, Manuel Meireles, Cida Sanches, Samuel Ferreira Jr., Marcio Luiz Marietto

This work proposes an artifact oriented by Design Science (DS) methods for measuring the degree of boldness in business social actors, especially entrepreneurs and businesspeople. To construct the artifact, the work of Eysenck and Wilson (1975) was used. The methodological approach used was Design Science, as the present object of study is considered an information artifact and, as such, has functions of data processing, reducing entropy (vision of syntax), forming meaning (vision of representation), and achieving viability (vision of adaptation). To ensure the validity of the study, a sample of users made up of 30 organizational psychologists was used, selected by convenience. The results demonstrated that using the artifact allows to measure entrepreneurs’ degree of boldness, affording them greater assertiveness in choosing and structuring their business. The study has a number of implications for managerial practice since by using the artifact it is possible to measure an entrepreneur’s degree of boldness and allow more assertive choices and structuring of their business, all the while reducing the rate of micro and small businesses that die early. In the academic field, the artifact will enable research on the degree of boldness of businesspeople with diverse other organizational variables.

24

Authors: Fernando Pires Barbosa, Mauri Leodir Löbler

Project portfolio management has been studied through diverse aspects. Different approaches have been used to improve project portfolio selection, but not all of them have been actually used. This study presents an artifact to improve project portfolio selection process in universities. The artifact considers strategic alignment and focuses on achieving consensus, considering university characteristics about strategic planning and decision making environment. The artifact was developed through an incremental approach using quasi-experiments in simulated situations to check and improve the accuracy of the solutions being developed. Finally, the artifact was implemented in a real situation inside a university, involving 185 projects, 15 criteria, and 12 people from different faculties and knowledge areas. Results show that the artifact is suitable to the university environment. Beyond the artifact itself and some highlights involving its development process, the multicriteria constructivist approach, the balanced scorecard, and the scoring technique, another contribution is an adapted AHP tool created to integrate traditional AHP from Saaty (1980) and a study from Bose (2015) to reduce cognitive conflict in group decision making. Other studies, in more diverse contexts, still need to be done, but the proposal seems to be promised.

27

Authors: André Luiz Surdi Debastiani, Graziela Dias Alperstedt, Grazielli Faria Zimmer Santos, Graziele Ventura Koerich

This study aimed to propose a business model framework for Brazilian agriculture from an integrative perspective between theory and practice. To do so, Design Research was adopted from the triangulation of data, combining primary and secondary data collection, a systematic review of the literature on the business model and its main frameworks. Field research included the application of a questionnaire with 531 producers and an in-depth interview with another 30 to capture their insight into the factors that influence their business performance. The results of the study revealed that unlike other sectors, which have customers as the central point of the business value generation proposal, in commercial agriculture organizations occupy this place, as they are focused on the production of commodities. In view of this, the proposed artifact has financial viability as the central pillar of the agricultural business model, with production costs, product sales prices and agricultural productivity as its main components.