TÜRKİYE GİRİŞİMCİLİK EKOSİSTEMİNDE TASARIMCILARIN ROLLERİ, KATKILARI VE ETKİSİ

Along with developments in the technological and business environments, the transition from industrial to knowledge-based economies has expanded the scope of industrial design beyond product-oriented practices and has influenced the roles designers play by leveraging their knowledge and skills. Although the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach emphasizes that entrepreneurial activity is shaped by interactions among actors, institutions, and contextual conditions, designers are rarely treated as a distinct and visible actor group. In the Turkish context, the developing entrepreneurial ecosystem attracts professionals from various disciplines, including industrial design, and provides a suitable setting for examining designers’ roles within the ecosystem. Addressing the gap in empirical research on designers in the ecosystem, this study examines their roles, skills, and impacts through 51 semi-structured interviews with designers and participants from other disciplines who work with them in startup firms and support organizations. The analysis conceptualizes designers’ contributions across task, organizational, and ecosystem levels of engagement and proposes a new framework of designer roles: functional, integrative, and initiative roles. In addition, the findings affecting designers’ integration into the entrepreneurial ecosystem were mapped and presented through Isenberg’s domains of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and the Ecosystem Model of Designer Integration was developed. Bringing together the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature and design studies by focusing on designers’ integration into the ecosystem, this study offers both conceptual and empirical contributions. It also presents structural, educational, and professional implications for strengthening designers’ integration into the ecosystem, based on the proposed role framework and integration model.