Futurice has developed a co-creation tool for exploring user-centric IoT scenarios called IoT Service Kit. We played with the tool in our team in the context of conference services. The outcome was inventive, indeed! You can see our persona, her desires and goals in the pictures below. The game board depicts the concepts we developed. For example, in the conference cafeteria the conference participant can check-in within proximity of a beacon of certain coffee table and register her interests or topics she wants to discuss with other participants, who again can see these topics in their conference app map. Interesting, huh? I think enabling efficient networking would be a very welcomed value adding service to conferences or other big meet-ups for professionals.

Jan Schmiedgen from Hasso-Plattner Institute has researched the cultural challenges related to adoption of design thinking in organizations. Design Thinking is seen as a path to innovation culture but the hen-egg challenge exists in building the capabilities for innovation.

Jan’s advice to building the right organizational design and environment was to start simultaneously in all of the three main actions of the circle – building innovation capabilities, using design thinking and changing mindset. But the thing is still to start small in most contexts. A good idea is to create an innovation catalyst network and to reframe metrics so that they direct the organization to adopt DT.

He encouraged us to get familiar with Wendy Castleman’s work, she leads an Innovation Catalyst Community at Intuit.

Design around the value for customer

 

Luis Arnal, founder of Insitum, reminded in his key note speech the service designers to consider the differences in mature vs. emerging markets. In Germany as well as in Finland and the western countries in general, people have scarce time resources but instead money to spend. In Africa it is the other way around. So, the solutions should be designed accordingly, around the value for customer. Value is not always quality!

The last speaker provoked a start of a movement to create and nurture a culture of innovation in companies. And so a movement called SPARX was born in SXC15 🙂