Following the literature on entrepreneurial framing and identity change, we examined how Chinese shan-zhai phone entrepreneurs have drawn on their cultural resources to reframe their businesses to claim new identities and gain legitimacy over time. Through qualitative procedures, we found that a staged process of collective identity development underlies this entrepreneurial process, consisting of building (a) niche-market identity via pragmatic reframing, (b) socio-political identity via nationalistic reframing, and finally (c) professional identity via comprehensive reframing. There has also been a clear change in the sources of legitimacy from the indigenous market through the wider Chinese society to the more globally defined industry. Our central contribution is a processual model of identity change through cultural reframing specifically focused on how informal entrepreneurs grow into formalization and global competition.

This study centers on using different types of brief information to support creative outcomes in architectural and engineering design and its relation to design expertise. We explore the influence of design briefs characterized by abstract representations and/or instructions to frame design problems on the creativity of concept sketches produced by novice and advanced students. Abstract representations of problem requirements served as stimuli to encourage associative thinking and knowledge transfer. The Ishikawa/Fishbone Diagram was used to foster design restructuring and to modify viewpoints about the main design drives and goals. The design outcomes generated by novice and advanced engineering/architecture students were assessed for their creativity using a pairwise experimental design. Results indicated that advanced students generated more novel design solutions while also contributing the most useful solutions overall. Implications for creativity in design education and professional practice are presented. Educational programs aimed at promoting creativity in the design studio may find it helpful to consider that the way design briefs are constructed can either promote or inhibit different aspects of design creativity.

The problems of today are increasingly complex in nature. Yet, most support provided by design agencies and innovation consultancies is based on unstructured approaches, guided by the facilitators own intuition. This article presents the Teckel canvas, an approach to guide problem reframing in facilitation to both tackle solution and problem understanding. After synthesising the main insights from prominent reframing methods and models, a meta-process of reframing was created, which was translated into a practical canvas. Two Dutch case studies are examined in which the proposed reframing canvas is tested. When this canvas was used in facilitation, we found out that the medium and message can be reframed separately or together and that the canvas can be used as a tool for overview on the subject. Our findings indicate that an explicit and tangible use of reframing can improve solving complex problems to be more clear, visual and reflective.

An invited tropical vignette from a very visible international and organisational psychologist illustrates, along with one of the world's top professional golfers, how reframing a setback in sports or life can, with fresh perspective, be converted into greater opportunity.