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Design thinking is attracting practitioners and researchers in various walks of life. User integration principle as part of design thinking is expected to transform product and service creation and delivery. Accordingly, various organisations that venture into design thinking develop customised solutions and serve people’s needs. Social enterprises, which are familiar for their superior social value creation, have also claimed to embark upon this innovative approach to address wicked problems. The current paper makes an attempt to analyse various social and organisational processes that promote social enterprises to adopt design thinking to create products, which are relevant and viable among user groups. This paper finds that by adopting design thinking, social enterprises portray their product innovation genre, thereby representing their passion in addressing wicked problems more effectively.

This research adopts a qualitative case study method to understand the practice of design thinking in social enterprises.

In this study, it is found that that social enterprises adopt design thinking as a methodology while exploring solutions for stubborn problem space. However, neither communities nor social entrepreneurial teams are aware that they are carrying out design thinking practices. This research finds that social entrepreneurs and their teams take up designer roles and carry out designing processes by continuously consulting with user groups. One of the major reasons for the unintended adoption of design thinking is related to community integration and user participation in the day-to-day practices of social enterprises.

This study offers original research to understand social entrepreneurial exploration to adopt design thinking to create social value.

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence-based policy recommendations for improving the implementation of universal service funds (USF) with a view to closing the digital divide in Africa.

The paper adopts a qualitative approach that draws examples from various African countries supported by 25 interviews from key stakeholders with hands-on experience and roles that shape telecommunications policy in Africa and other developing countries.

The study's findings point out that institutional voids which characterize several African countries inhibit the effectiveness of USF in African countries. The authors identify several institutional and organisational factors and explain how they negatively affect the performance of USF. The authors find that in order to overcome these obstacles, there is a need for a clear redefinition of Universal Access and Service (UAS) policies, restructuring the governance of USF, encouraging cross-sectoral collaborations, and bottom-up initiatives to bridge the digital divide in African countries.

The paper contributes to the underexplored USF literature by shedding light on the role of institutional factors in determining the success of USF. The paper thus complements and provides a different perspective on promoting digital inclusion in Africa from the viewpoint of institutional voids, bringing new insights into the existing literature on how to deal with an intractable area of UAS policy and the wider digital divide debate in developing countries.