Service Innovation & Design

  • Empathy in focus: Design Thinking during disruption

    Today, the uncertainty around us is overwhelming. The world is saturated with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA). However, we need to manage our daily lives, improve, create, and deliver. Design Thinking (DT) methods provide us with a chain of systematic approaches to tackle the novel beast head-on and conquer. The DT process takes us…

  • Design Thinking For Management Education

    “What’s in for me?”, the manager asks. “Anything”, we answered. “It depends on how we find it”. In terms of developing or dealing with the new in increasingly complex interdependencies and the capability to integrate various perspectives in the decision-making process, Design Thinking (DT) implies the potential to become a great asset for any organization.…

  • Becoming a Design Thinking Organization: Sense Making through Empathy

    Co-authored by Airine Kariuki and Saper Sahbaz “There is only one valid purpose of a corporation: to create a customer” (Drucker, 2006). As called by some “the father of modern management”, Peter Drucker drew attention to customer-centricity 67 years ago, dividing the management practice into two camps: those who strive for customer value creation vs.…

  • Why do we need empathy in the design process and how to gain it?

    Introduction to empathy Most of us can probably recall products or services where it is clear that usability has been so far off from the priority list that the product/service is unreasonably difficult or even impossible to use. What is needed that these above-mentioned mishaps can be avoided and services and products designed are actually…

  • Diving Into the World of Design Thinking

    “Now I want you all to introduce yourselves, but this time you will do it differently.” – this is how our Design Thinking course started and little did we know what will follow afterwards. To present ourselves we were divided into groups, where each of us had to first, speak about her/himself, second, count one…

  • Once upon a time, there was a design thinker…

    Once upon a time, there was a design thinker…

    The first course in our exciting journey of Service Innovation and Design learning started with a deep dive into the world of Design Thinking. Our class has an interesting mix of different professional domains and backgrounds, which, as we learned from professor Katja Tschimmel, is a great foundation for a creative team.  …who believed in the power of collaboration The two…

  • Megatrends and the future of work

    Work changes, as it always has After living for the past year and half in unnormal circumstances, the whole world is asking the same question;” what is the new normal and has the work changed permanently and how?” No one has a crystal ball to give the answer, but there are some tools in our…

  • Design Thinking at first touch

    DT is becoming extensively popular in modern era as more and more organizations are striving to provide compelling and innovative solutions to their customers. Design thinking helps to expand one’s creativity as well as enables one to utilize a broader range of tools and approaches for innovative solutions. What is it exactly? Design thinking has…

  • A Design Thinking Crash Test

    Erika Bäck & Sabine Maselkowski Two days of Design Thinking ‘crash test’ (read: course) behind. All we think is we need to pass, like a car tested for the safety standards. Days went by at high-speed, challenging our ways of thinking and working, let’s start… Design? Design Thinking?  To get answers we looked both past…

  • Users as Co-designers in Public Services

    Too often the approach in the development of public services has been “This system has now been built for you, welcome, please use it”. Lately it has become obvious that to make services sustainable and attractive, this has to be changed. Hence, service design is increasingly applied also in the development of public services. In…