Category: SID methods

  • Design Thinking breeds Innovation Culture

    Design thinking breeds innovation mindset. In order for a team to co-create a successful and innovative product or service, design thinking and design tools are paramount in today’s cut-throat competitive environment. Design thinking acts as an interface between business, technology, products, services and consumers. Design thinking is a non-linear iterative process that helps us in…

  • Transform Your Business Through Design Thinking

    The postindustrial digital age and the emergence of the experience economy have fundamentally changed the requirements and the expectations how companies develop and deliver new services. Well-known brands like Airbnb, Mayo Clinic, Bank of America and HBO have all understood this shift and successfully utilized holistic design thinking approach to transform their business. They have…

  • Design Thinking: A Left-Brain Viewpoint

    Constraints foster creativity. In this case, my own limitations. At the core, I am an analyst, a conceptual thinker used to dealing with words rather than images. Most of my best service design work so far has furthermore been done using traditional survey methods rather than the kind of innovative methods promoted by designers like…

  • We Are the New Design Thinkers!

    “How many of you consider yourselves as design thinkers?” asked our guest lecturer Gijs van Wulfen (Innovation Consultant and founder of FORTH Innovation method) when our SID 2014 group started the Design Thinking course. Not so many hands rose at that point, I was certainly hesitating. However, we were soon about to learn what Design…

  • Design Thinking For Business Innovation

    Design Thinking For Business Innovation

    Innovation has always be seen as a myth, where genius is the main ingredient for it. Unfortunately this is not the reality! Innovation can be a systematic process. The key to successful innovations is to understand where the process starts. The process starts by first understanding the current needs, the current obstacles the target audience want to overcome and then formulating insights that can guide…

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 5/5

    Multidisciplinary teamwork, simple but effective tools, virtual work, visualization, prototyping, design thinking… There are tons of different tools designers can use in their work. This is my final blog post about the designer tools our innovation team uses in our everyday work here at the UNICEF Headquarters in New York. This time I’ll introduce two projects relating to…

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 4/5

    The New York University (NYU) students I referred to in my last blog post about virtual work were asked to prepare a 1-minute video to communicate their ideas for the next class. There are so many ways to visualize projects and their components that I can only just begin to grasp the subject in this post. I…

  • Learning in Action – How We Won the Second Place in a Service Design Competition

    ”Could you send a female inspector?” This is how Jaakko started our pitch at Sitras’s Service Design competition on March 3, 2014. The competition was part of Sitra’s new security forum, and it intended to test how service design could help to improve public services and make them more user-centric. The actual design goal set…

  • Attitude matters in lean thinking: learn to fail fast for success!

    “Focus on the problem, not solution. You cannot quantify your way to the big max.” – Ola Sundell I still remember when ‘lean’ was a buzzword in manufacturing industry years and years ago. Lean concept was originally based on production process optimisation principles invented in Toyota for automotive industry back in early seventies. Now the…

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 3/5

    My last blog post discussed simple tools our team uses in our everyday work at the UNICEF Innovation Unit in New York. This time my topic – virtual work – is especially current for our team. At the moment, we are having “virtual January” which means we can choose where we want to work, be it…