Service Innovation & Design

  • Empowering everyone to be creative with Design Thinking

    Unlock creativity with Design Thinking. Join us to solve real-world challenges, reshape products, and make a positive impact. It’s not just for designers; it’s a tool for all. Explore the human-centred approach, empathise, and channel creativity to find solutions. Embrace Design Thinking as a lighthouse of hope in our ever-changing world.

  • Designing thinking and change in practice

    by Carolina Faria & Irina Tikanvaara The teaching sessions with Daniela Marzavan, where we had two thought-provoking days and a hands-on workshop, provided a widening experience of the practical use of design thinking to solve a given task. The goal was to find the solutions for practical cases using design thinking, its methods and tools…

  • It’s time to play, seriously! – Using design thinking to solve today’s problems

    Remember when as a child you used to build stuff out of everyday things like sticks and sand? Maybe role play as a doctor or a parent? This all comes naturally for children but for some reason we stop playing as adults. It is time to bring those old skills back and put them to…

  • How Interdisciplinary teams are the catalyst to innovations 

    Imagine this: a group of experts in one specific field are working together on an incredibly challenging problem. They are intelligent, proficient, and polite. They ask reasonable questions, answer them and everyone agrees with each other. Perfect picture, isn’t it? Or not?   Picture: AI generated image that represents the homogeneous team.  According to Linda A.Hill…

  • ”It might be a gamechanger to step in the shoes of your customer.”

    The quote in the title was spoken out by our lecturer, Daniela Marzavan, on our first day of the Design Thinking-course (DT) in Laurea. Here, we learned how one could adopt the mind of a 5 year-old by asking numerous Why`s and deciding that a tape roll can be an airplane if it’s said to…

  • Empathy in action – how to protect toddler naps in extreme circumstances

    You know the Fazer chocolates, right? You have seen them at the airports at least.   Some years ago, a construction company called NCC in Finland had to renovate an office above a nursery at the Fazer chocolate factory. This created a challenge: how to keep the noisy construction from waking up the toddlers during their…

  • We all just love problems, don’t we?

    We all just love problems, don’t we?

    Today we have all kinds of complex problems that need holistic solutions. Sometimes we do not even know what the problem is – so how can we ideate solutions then? A non-linear and iterative approach, Design Thinking, has offered a choice for solving complex problems – and impacted extensively the modern world’s innovations in business…

  • Design Thinking: Streamlining Creativity

    A reflection by Alvaro Valls Boix and Erson Halili – Students at Service Innovation and Design MBA @Laurea UAS Defining Creativity is a complex task, since the term is interpreted differently in different cultures and contexts. However, from a cognitive and mental activity perspective, Creativity is defined as the cognitive capacity to develop something new…

  • How can organizations unleash creative potential?

    During the master class we felt ourselves and saw our fellow participants get ignited with a feeling of creativity and gaining a new appreciation of what is considered as creative. Many of us believed to not be creative, but when faced with the right questions and frameworks, most of us realized we indeed are. We…

  • The lone creative genius is dead

    Design thinking can be defined as a human-centered approach to problem solving, creativity and innovation that brings along new and more effective solutions (Kaartti 2022; Brown 2019).  Its definition has evolved since the 1990s; with some viewing it as a cognitive process or a mindset, and others seeing it as a toolkit for innovation processes,…