Martin Eppler

The benefits of visualization are starting to be exploited in the field of management. Beyond cognitive and communicative advantages, this view point article highlights how visualization can enhance collaborative activities in organizations. Recent trends in management indicate that the activity of visualizing can be as important as the pictures that are generated. Qualitative visualizations such as conceptual diagrams, metaphors or sketches are used as collaboration catalysts to facilitate a variety of tasks, from idea generation to decision making and planning. The article derives future research avenues in this promising and interdisciplinary field of inquiry, including the impact of immersive worlds, electronic sketches or multi-user interfaces for collaborative managerial tasks.

Social entrepreneurship is an emerging field which has the power to change the way we do business and resolve societal challenges. Visualization has not yet been systematically applied to support social entrepreneurs in creating, growing and scaling their ventures. We thus propose a framework for the use of knowledge visualization in the creation and development of social enterprises. We posit that each phase of the social venturing process requires a different knowledge visualization method. These diverse types of (interactive) graphic representations help social entrepreneurs cope with resource constraints and interact with a great variety of stakeholders. In this contribution we thus show that knowledge visualization can provide versatile and inexpensive ways to augment social entrepreneurs' activities systematically.