Designing and Testing an OD Intervention

Abstract

This article presents a design-based research study on the reporting of intellectual capital in firms. It combines the designing of an organization development (OD) intervention with the testing of the intervention using an action research methodology. A growing gap between theory-based research and practice has been identified in the literature as one of the reasons for a lack of renewal in the field of OD. Design-based research (DBR) has been proposed as a methodology that can help bridge the gap between theory-based research and practice. The purpose of this article is to illustrate what a comprehensive methodology for design-based research might look like and to demonstrate the type of OD knowledge this research can produce. The DBR approach is used to design and test a tool for the reporting of intellectual capital within firms as an OD intervention aimed toward influencing the individual and collective sensemaking of managers.