Service Innovation & Design

  • Adapt Lean and take a step ahead and see the difference

    The Day starts with Lean Market Entry Lecture by Olla sundell CEO of Hub Helsinki. LeanThinking being the agenda of the day everything around was supposed to be Lean. Lean methodology is what I have learnt after being part of this service design industry. This topic has been one of my personal favorites. Lean is a…

  • Culture & Service Design

    Service design is allegedly a human-centered method for developing new services. A great effort is made for capturing users’ needs, mental models, experiences, desired outcomes… —you name it! Although this is done specifically borrowing techniques from ethnography, there’s barely no mention to cultural differences! With increasingly global companies, rising migration rates or whole sectors —such…

  • Service Design Achievement Award

    I participated in the first Service Design Achievement Award seminar on 22nd of January which was hosted by Katri Ojasalo from Laurea and Håkan Mitts from Aalto. The event took place at Aalto Design Factory. Five Finnish service design agencies participanted in the competition, and they had presented their best projects in the last fall’s Service Design Breakfast…

  • 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…

  • Community Managers Appreciated

    “Brands have to consider the conversation itself as the canvas, without the comfort of knowing what the response will be.” Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter Four years ago, in 2010 digital media strategist Jeremiah Owyang said out loud that the hard working community managers ought to be appreciated. He proposed that every fourth Monday of January…

  • Do Your Service Speak Different Cultures ?

    Figure 1 – Multicultural faces, source: http://geoffallan.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html   Hello, Culture! The cross-cultural issues in service was my first elective course with in my Service Innovation & Design MBA study; with the expectations set to provide a better understanding to cross cultural aspects of service design, and I wasn’t mistaken at all! Coming from an background…

  • Cross-cultural issues in Service Development

         Are you interested in different cultures, curios and want to get a deeper understanding of how you can tackle cross-cultural issues within service development? Laurea offers an elective course within this topic, which can be integrated in your MBA in Service Innovation and Design, and I highly recommend it! The course consists of a…

  • 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…

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 2/5

    This post is a sequel for my last one that dealt with teamwork – one of the most important tools in design. I briefly introduced our team’s working habits here at the UNICEF Innovation Unit in New York. Now, I will discuss simple design tools that have a much bigger impact than we might first think. Simple…

  • Wrapping up the “New Service Development and innovative service systems” course

    During this fall, we have been introduced to various business related topics. In the “New Service Development and innovative services systems” course, we have learned the basics of blueprinting and how to create a business model canvas. Course objectives include; students can create a plan for developing a service concept and also evaluate and improve…