HPI Design Thinking, 5-core elements for innovation

Inspired by www.hpi.dk Design School in Berlin, we present our plans for Danish Design Agency.

www.servicelabs.dk is your new Service Design Thinking & Design Management IoT Agency. We solve business and it-challenges for private and public organisations turning IoT-UX into sustainable eco-systems. How we UX-analyse & CX-design IoT business it-challenge: Visit www.servicelabs.dk

Our Design Thinking knowledge and experiences from attending events in Berlin - is listed below:

Design Thinking - 5 core elements for sustainable innovation of industries by www.hpi.de

www.startupnight.de - arranged by Deutsche Telekom and Volkswagen Group for innovative Startups.

Service Design Thinking LEAN UX Camp - hosted by www.zalando.com

What is Design Thinking and how can businesses benefit from it?

Source: What is Design Thinking and how can businesses benefit from it?

Conclusion

These tools have always existed for the successful business across the world where they put the customer at the core. Successful businesses have feedback tools and strategy to constantly innovate in this efficiency-based changing world. Design Thinking can become all the more relevant today as times are changing fast but it only stays effective if understood and mastered and this takes time. As discussed that nowadays it hardly takes two to three years for a successful product to become boring and the danger of becoming obsolete and that is why Design Thinking methodology can help businesses thrive because it puts the customer at the core of evolving, changing or designing something new. As I have already discussed that if made a habit to incorporate Design Thinking into the culture, it can help organisations change faster than the likes of Nokia who could not adapt to the changing customers needs, wants and motivations. It is way of thinking and approaching a problem and once understood can do wonders. For management to actually imbibe Design Thinking into their culture requires top management to explore in a holistic way as a part of their business strategy rather than some tool used by some fancy design agencies.

How Design Thinking can be effectively used in businesses to foster growth and innovation?

First I would like to reflect on how few advocates of Design Thinking reciprocate that it is not effective if not understood thoroughly and applied properly. I have come to an understanding that Design Thinking can be mastered with time and works wonders once the essence of it is felt. As (Brown, 2011) says “ Whenever I’m faced with a tough business challenge, rather than trying to use some prescribed CEO logic, I tackle it as a design problem. That’s not an inborn ability, it’s a skill — OK, a mastery — learned over many years of doing”

(Nussbaum, 2011) one of Design Thinking’s biggest advocates says that Design Thinking has given the design profession and society at large all the benefits it has to offer and is beginning to ossify and actually do harm. He says that by packaging within a process businesses see it as a linear, gated by the book methodology. He adds CEO’s especially took to the process side of Design Thinking as an efficiency based process hoping that a process trick would significant cultural and organisational change. In order to appeal to business culture process, it is often denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions and looping circularity which is part and parcel of creative process. (Kilian, 2015) says that by conducting contextual one-on-one interviews, shopper-shadowing exercises, and “follow me homes” to observe, listen, and learn how people actually use and experience products, plot out customer decision journeys helps businesses understand exactly what motivates people, what bothers them, and where there are opportunities for creating delightful experiences.

(Sarrazin, 2015) director McKinsey’s Silicon Valley says Design thinking and everything associated with it is now more central to business strategy. He adds that good design can be very smart once measurement tools are in place to provide the feedback to the designers. This is just good business sense, and it’s exciting that we’re bringing an extra layer of thinking around what the customer is experiencing, or what the customer is expecting.

(Nooyi, 2015) PepsiCo’s CEO says that in order to have the sustainable competitive advantage you have to reinvent every two to three years, as opposed to an earlier period of eight to ten years. She wants to bring in a cultural change to push Design Thinking into business strategy. Design Thinking actually helps accelerates the process to build new products, fail and learn faster. PepsiCo could achieve double digits bottomline growth with this. In organisations like Amazon, the executive team is required to call in and visit the call centres and listen to customer needs firsthand. That’s a great example where everybody is in charge of understanding what customers’ needs, motivations, pain points, and behaviours are, and for making them paramount in solving business problems. Apple or Uber or even Airbnb have different ways of bringing the user experience to the forefront, it is a way to fundamentally compete. Deutsche Bank, for example, required all employees to use products that its customers used as a way to understand what customers were experiencing.

I believe that design is about learning, and what could be a greater gift than to have an organisation that’s constantly learning? I also believe that human’s constantly evolve and so should the products and services revolving around them. If businesses are able to understand the needs of the customer and have an organization that’s good at doing this on an ongoing basis, it can create engagement and loyalty and something truly special bond between a company, its customers and its employees. Understanding the customer is everyone’s job, keeping empathy as central to the organization, designing in real time, and being able to act quickly are the main pieces of the design-driven culture.

Of course, there are the trappings that make those things easier to embody. Things like flexible workspaces that have great areas for collaboration, making it easy to come together quickly. Rooms that can be set up so that there are hybrid teams sitting together that are cross-functional. Thinking about breaking down any traditional barriers and walls to make it easier to collaborate, easier to keep humans first, and easier to think about how we learn, and test, and fail, and get things to market quickly. That’s how design thinking and design- driven cultures can allow businesses to be more successful and have a greater impact. It is a strategic weapon businesses can include in their arsenal.

Source: What is Design Thinking and how can businesses benefit from it?

The Rise & Fall of Design Thinking at Oticon

Source: http://thisisdesignthinking.net/2015/05/the-rise-fall-of-design-thinking-at-oticon/

The Rise & Fall of Design Thinking at Oticon

Source: http://thisisdesignthinking.net/2015/05/the-rise-fall-of-design-thinking-at-oticon/

In 2007, top management of hearing aid manufacturer Oticon boldly established a working group dedicated to a rather new and odd thing called design thinking. Three years later, the group was dissolved. This is the story of a tragic misunderstanding and untapped potential.

We talked to a former Oticon employee who decided to go to Denmark in 2007. At first it was difficult for him to find a job there. Even with a degree in mechanical engineering from one of the best universities in the US and a lot of work experience with his own consulting company it seemed difficult to get hired. Then a recruiter took a special interest in him, and the result was a job offer at Oticon, one of the world’s leading hearing aid manufacturers. They made a surprising proposal: “We’re just starting a new group called Centre for Design Thinking (CDT). You would be perfect for it.”

At that time, Oticon was taking a courageous step in a new direction. The top management decided to invest in a completely new group with an uncertain outcome a group that would “invent things.” The leader of this innovation group decided to embrace a relatively unorthodox idea called design thinking, and top management soon came to support the philosophy.

New Working Styles

Our interviewee’s first day at work was CDT’s first day as a department at Oticon. The Centre consisted of a multidisciplinary team with people from business, audiology and engineering. Our engineer was the only new employee in the team, as everybody else was chosen from within the organization. How did the team proceed?

“The manager of CDT gave us the freedom to work in our own way, which was quite unusual at Oticon or any other company.” Everybody could work with everybody. The big advantage of this was that after a very short time our interview partner got to know the products, people and processes at Oticon very well.

The job of the CDT team was to create insights about both the users and the people who sell hearing aids. It would of course be necessary to figure out how these insights could lead to new products and services. Directly talking to users was a novel approach at Oticon, as was bringing in external knowledge: “We also worked with different consultants. That was something my manager as well as I did. It was important for him to bring in external expertise, whether from other companies, universities, or other places.”

A Fresh & Simple Perspective

When the CDT team talked to users they heard a lot of complaints. These rumblings of displeasure were not fully known in the organization. One thing CDT members heard was that the speaker units that go inside in the ear canal in receiver-in-the-ear-canal (RITE) hearing devices were not very comfortable. CDT set out to measure ear canal geometry from many people and provided the rest of the organization with guidelines for more ergonomically shaped speaker units.

Our interviewee recalls: “As an engineer, if you develop a smartphone chances are you are the user yourself. But as a hearing aid developer you are most likely to be very far away from the concrete experience of actually wearing a hearing aid. That’s why it was not surprising that a lot of people we talked to complained about it. Based on simple things like listening to people who said it wasn’t comfortable and doing measurements we were able to show that the design could be improved. The hearing aid was then actually redesigned and works much better now.”

Lack of Respect

Unfortunately, members of the CDT often felt that they were not taken seriously by other departments. The situation grew more serious when the management was also not able to understand the group’s contribution to the company.

Our interviewee remembers: “We had a lot of problems convincing people that we were doing useful work. People in other parts of the organization even laughed at the name ‘design thinking.’ There were so many jokes with ‘thinking,’ such as, ‘Oh, are you guys the ones who do all the thinking?’”

Unfortunately, for too many other stakeholders they became perceived as a threat more than a help – e.g. within marketing and sales. They very often stumbled into that barrier.

Clouds on the Horizon

The team had a “terrible time” trying to spread their insight to the rest of the organization. But even when people listened to them, it was often already too late: “People would say something like, ’decisions have already been made.’ There was always an excuse for why our work could not be incorporated into the design. That was frustrating.”

Our interviewee tells us that even physical space became the source of trouble. As a Scandinavian company, Oticon placed a high emphasis on order and neatness. “Things had to look really nice and clean. There was no culture of being messy and creative.” But when you are doing design work the process is often messy. “You might have drawings or half completed prototypes or post-its, sketches, or just about anything else,” the former CDT member explains. “But at that time it was forbidden to have anything that looked remotely messy. There was no space.”

The team ended up buying whiteboards with wheels, which they could wheel into a corner for the sake of neatness. Nevertheless, the CDT team felt as if they just did not fit into the rest of the organization. Soon people perceived them as a disruptive factor.

These physical space problems combined with the lack of awareness about the team’s achievements led to final decisions being made concerning the CDT in 2010.

Dissolution of Design Thinking

After three years, the decision to dissolve CDT came from the very top. There was the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and there was this CDT-group that was perceived as “just sitting around, talking to other people and hiring experts” without bringing in money in a visible way.

One day in 2010 the then head of R & D came into a CDT meeting. He said that he had looked at the organizational chart, “and CDT is not on it.” Our interview partner recalls: “That was his way of telling us that we had been closed down. His second sentence was: ‘Your boss is no longer an employee of the company.’ We were shocked.”

Within one year the mantra went from “innovation and efficiency” into “quality and efficiency”. While many will agree that in difficult times you should sharpen your innovative abilities, in daily operation it became increasingly difficult to defend this position, resulting in an organization chart without the CDT.

Shortly after this, four members of the CDT team left the company for new assignments. It took the management and the R & D department years to understand the value of CDT.

Afterwards, the CDT team’s job of talking to the user and getting new insights was shifted to marketing. Our interviewee remembers: “I just thought, this is a disaster. The marketing guys are trained to sell stuff; they’re not trained to listen to customers and identify unmet user needs.”

His intuition was right. The marketing employees still just kept reading press releases of other companies instead of talking to hearing aid users.

Oticon learned from their mistakes. Today they have a “discovery team”, basically doing the job of the CDT but doing projects in collaboration with numerous internal stakeholders. “Hopefully they are guys who are more integrated into the company,” says our interview partner.

Perhaps CDT’s most notable contribution was their study and suggestions related to dispensers (the audiologists and other professionals that actually sell the hearing aids). The people of CDT can take full credit for Oticon’s strategy on engaging with dispensers, which ironically was launched by marketing in the weeks after CDT was closed down.

What Oticon has learned from the #failure of its skunk works #designthinking #innovation unit.

About Oticon

Oticon is the world’s second largest hearing aid manufacturer. It is situated in Denmark and it was founded in 1904 by Hans Demant. It has has more than 3,000 employees worldwide. In the management literature Oticon is known for its change processes (called „Spaghetti organization“).

Source: http://thisisdesignthinking.net/2015/05/the-rise-fall-of-design-thinking-at-oticon/