Service Innovation & Design

  • “Out of the Box and Then Back in Again” – The ABC of Design Thinking

    How many ways of using a pen could you come up with in two minutes? I managed to write down 10. Actually that’s not very creative. Some people can easily think of even 20 or more ways. They are more trained in Design Thinking. We, the SID group of 2013, started our Service Innovation and…

  • The journey of Design thinking begins

    There are thousands of things that can go wrong on the path from an idea to a problem solving solution. To help with the process there are plenty of methodologies and tools to formulate, conceptualize and execute ideas into a feasible business plan. At the end, the goal is to bring the ideas to life…

  • JamJaming in Barcelona

    Global Service Jams are these incredible and really fun events related to service design that are celebrated all over the globe. Twice a year, a bunch of experienced jammers and hosts meet to make them wilder, more fun and even more productive. Its the JamJam. Last time, it happened in Barcelona, on September 27th-29th. And,…

  • Failures are possibilities

    Me and 27 other students were privileged to start the Service Innovation and Design Master’s program last September in Laurea University of Applied Sciences. Our first course was about Design Thinking held by Katja Tschimmel a Design professor and an entrepreneur, and Gijs van Wulfen the writer of the excellent book “The Innovation Expedition”. How many things…

  • Work and play – a possible combination?

    I have always been puzzled by my somewhat selective memory. It seems that for exams at the University I was always able to remember the way the page looked, instead of the text that I should have remembered since I read the book. So, after a lot of trial and error I have come to…

  • Example of Extremely Lean Service Design and Development in Reactor

    In the second Service Design Breakfast event this fall organized by Aalto University and Startup Sauna on October 16, Reaktor presented the case where they integrated service design with lean software development. The project, done for Barona, was about creating software that would find best match between jobs and job applicants. Starting point was construction…

  • “Doing things differently” or “Doing different things”.

    Innovation can either be doing things differently, or doing different things. Within the field of innovation people are now doing a lot of different things, but I would say its only done a little differently when speaking about areas such as “Employee driven innovation, “Service innovation”, “Sustainable innovation”, “Social innovation” and so on. This can…

  • To Facilitate or to Innovate?

    It wasn’t any given normal day it was the very second day for the Service Innovation and Design studies at Laurea. We’re all gathered up in our class room. Our lecturers and facilitators Gijs van Wulfen and Prof. Katja Tschimmel for this two day’s Design Thinking course were presented to us. Unlike normally lecturers would…

  • Make us simple, please

    When you have an organization with 11 faculties with 24 departments, 8500 employees, 35000 students, 137 IT-systems and a very long history of academic independence, what do you do when they ask you to make them simple? Service design agency Palmu faced this assignment and shared their story of a service design project with the…

  • The MindTrek 2013 Experience – 5 Take-Aways for Aspiring Service Designers

    If you have never attended the MindTrek Festival I do advice you to do so. This year they promised this: ”International three-day forum about the future of tech, knowledge and media. Expand your mind, step into the conversation and share the experience with like-minded”. Sounds pretty cool don’t you think! This was my third time. I…