Tag Archive | change

The Era of Disruption as an Innovation Enabler — How to Spot and Scan Trends to Kick-Start the Change?

The future takes time to build, and each day is an opportunity to reflect on and plan for the next day

From the Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation by Carleton et al. 2013

The global pandemic outbreak in spring 2020 is continuing to disrupt markets, organizations and even our behaviours. As changes, new needs, expectations and innovations are emerging, it is important to proactively make sense of this new context.

The era of disruption tends to provide a valuable moment to experiment with new business ideas and even launch businesses. In fact, as Trend Hunter highlights, a large number of companies has been established during a recession, including Adobe, Apple, CNN, Disney, Hyatt, IBM, Instagram, Microsoft, Pinterest and WhatsApp.

As an innovation designer and change facilitator, I have helped both small and large businesses to build an understanding on the importance of trend spotting and scanning. In this article, I will cover the current context and challenges for innovation, the benefits of trend spotting and scanning, 3 insightful sources for trends and one practical framework to get started.

Current Context

Many brands are highly valuing the innovations. If we take Peter Drucker’s definition for the term innovation (in Harvard Business Review 2002), i.e. “the effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential”, it should indeed be high on every brand’s agendas.

Interestingly, according to Salesforce research released in May 2020, marketers’ current top priority is innovating, while simultaneously it is also one of their top challenges. This example demonstrates the dilemma people tend to have for activities related to innovations.

Based on various research conducted, a majority of people state they simply don’t have time to work on ideas, although many acknowledge its importance. As Jeremy Gutsche, CEO of Trend Hunter, emphasized in his keynote speech “How to Make Innovation & Change Happen”, there are a plenty of other distractors we all have, which are preventing us to focus on innovating. These can be categorized under six themes, as shown here.

Having said that, sometimes there’s no other choice than removing distractors. The research by Small Business Roundtable and Facebook, published in May 2020, confirmed how small and medium-sized businesses are facing immediate cash flow issues, lack of demand and an uncertain future.

Yet, despite of this rather gloomy context, entrepreneurial spirit and optimism are also present among businesses. Since small and medium-sized businesses are vital e.g. for local communities, finding new and creative ways to reach and serve customers is thus highly encouraged.

Benefits of Trend Analysis

Asemphasized by J. Peter Scoblic in the article “Learning from the Future”, published on Harvard Business Review in July-August 2020, the practice of strategic foresight provides capabilities to sense, shape, and adapt to change as it happens. As such, there are multiple frameworks and tools to anticipate possible futures.

One practical way going forward is to spot systematically evolving trends and new innovations and, consequently, analyze what these could mean for your brand, customers and the industry as a whole. Before moving on, it is meaningful to clarify how the term “trend” can be understood. A trend is a new manifestation among people, related to behaviour, attitude or expectation, of a fundamental human need, want or desire (Mason et al. 2015, 46). Trend analysis, on the other hand, is about considering the potential influence of patterns of change that are already visible (J. Peter Scoblic 2020, 44).

All trends, in the end, can offer valuable innovation opportunities. The key is to unlock these prospects by adapting them for your context. The focus should be how a trend is relevant, rather than whether it is relevant (Mason et al. 2015, 145).

This fact alone highlights the advantage of the trend analysis. Moreover, it can bring in multiple other benefits along the journey from fueling your creativity to meeting, or even exceeding, your customer expectations, as I have summarized in the illustration inspired by the Double Diamond model of the British Design Council.

3 Insightful and Inspiring Sources for Trends

How to spot trends easily? There are numerous organizations that are focusing on collecting, synthesizing and publishing insightful trend reports on a regular basis. These reports can be considered as valuable starting points to gain an overview on what’s trending. Especially acknowledging the issue with time most of us seem to have, it is easier to take advantage of curated and regularly updated trend reports by the trend agencies and the foresight specialists. My 3 favorite sources right now are the following.

Trend Hunter

Trendhunter.com is said to be the world’s largest trend community with 20 million monthly views and a database of over 400,000 ideas and innovations. The insightful content also includes inspiring trend reports, articles, newsletters, talks, tools and books.

Think with Google

Think with Google provides regular reports on signals, trends and insights based on Google data, research and analysis conducted by Google teams. Their newsletter is packed with interesting point of views and special collection pages on emerging trends with multiple data points, illustrated in graphs and other visual formats, are to the point.

TrendWatching

TrendWatching, a company specialized in consumer trend and innovations scanning, has both free and premium content available, but to start with, you can find a number of articles, reports, keynote talks and more. In 2020, TrendWatching has launched two new initiatives. Firstly, COVID Innovations site has a curated collection of over 1000 inspiring and recent innovations captured around the world, and secondly, Business of Purpose site proposes a community to exchange insights and share opportunities, and a plenty of curated resources, including statistics and insights. Moreover, TrendWatching delivers to its subscribers the “Innovation of the Day” content by email on a daily basis.

Trend Insights in Action: 1 Practical and Tested Framework

But what to do with all this future-oriented content? In the end, it is equally important to utilize these insights in ways that will be beneficial for you and your brand, while being able to grasp opportunities in a timely manner.

Innovation requires knowledge, ingenuity, and, above all else, focus.

– Peter F. Drucker, Harvard Business Review, 2002

To give focus and methodology, let me introduce one concrete framework, which I have found specifically useful to conduct trend analysis.

Trend Driven Innovation Methodology

TrendWatching has developed a framework called Trend Driven Innovation Methodology, which was thoroughly introduced in the book “Trend-Driven Innovation: Beat Accelerating Customer Expectations”.

According to this methodology, to be able to address the sweet spot, brands should track three key trend elements:

1. basic human needs,

2. drivers of change and

3. innovations.

Let’s explore these elements.

We humans all have basic needs, wants and desires, which remain the same, despite the changes happening around us. All trends are, after all, rooted in these basic needs. Authenticity, honesty, freedom and transparency can be considered as our fundamental needs.

What comes to changes, we know the change is constant, accelerated and happening everywhere. To understand the drivers of change, brands should look at shifts, i.e. the long-term macro changes and triggers.

The examples of shifts are climate change, urbanization and aging population. Triggers, on the other hand, are more immediate changes, such as political events, environmental incidents, and new technologies. What is trending in social networks or new products can give hints on social change. Frameworks such as PESTLE and STEEPLED provide support to analyze further these changes.

Thirdly, innovations are important since they inform on how the market is changing, what are the new entrants, new services, or experiences. Thus, spotting business innovations can help to assess what consumers will want next. In the end, innovations will create new expectations, which is why the terms such as “Expectation Economy”, “Experience Economy” and “Liquid Expectations” have been discussed in the recent years.

However, main emphasis should not be on these individual elements, but rather on the sweet spot, or tension, between basic needs, drivers of changes and innovations. This tension can be further evaluated by building an understanding on customer expectations and gaps between what is currently being offered (Mason et al. 2015, 48).

Transforming Current Trends to Innovative Ideas

The trend spotting encourages to act on the opportunities and identifying points of tension. How can you transform current trends to innovative ideas, which will be beneficial for your brand and your customers? Here’s a quick guide of main steps to take using the Trend Driven Innovation Methodology.

Step 1.

In practice, you can kick off your analysis by taking any of these starting points:

1. a new innovation and build an understanding what drivers of change and basic needs this innovation is addressing or

2. a new driver of change and spot innovations that are tackling this change or

3. a basic need by asking do I want to address it with my business, how I might satisfy this need, and consequently, what drivers of change are relevant for me that I can leverage.

Step 2.

Once you have decided your starting point, you can use the Consumer Trend Canvas to help you to structure and break down your analysis and ideation.

If you are short in time, you may try to get this filled in within a few hours. This approach, however, requires ideally some pre-work such as gathering trend inspiration in advance and securing a participation of multi-disciplinary team of at least 4 people, and a facilitator, for more creative results. On the contrary, you can also take your time and do some proper research for both parts of the canvas. If you are working alone, it would be beneficial to get some peer review and iterate the outputs accordingly.

Step 3.

Once your ‘analyze’ part ready, you can jump into the ‘apply’ part. It will be fruitful to ideate how you can potentially apply this trend and emerging expectations in your particular case and who would actually benefit from it.

Spend some time to ideate possible innovations and what would be the innovation potential. To get more ideas, I would recommend additionally to use a structured brainstorming method such as Creative Matrix. When ideating, remember to go for quantity over quality and focus on opportunities on where the attention and expectations are. Out of this ideation method, you can bring the most interesting ideas back to the Consumer Trend Canvas.

Step 4.

At this stage, you may wonder what shall you do once you have your first canvas filled in.

Ideally, you are ready to take a step forward, and go deeper how would this innovation actually work. For that purpose, you can use, for instance, the Business Model Canvas by Strategyzer and further ideate how to experiment the innovation using the Experiment Canvas, created by Ash Maurya.

If you can imagine an improved future state, you can likely make it happen

From the Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation by Carleton et al. 2013

To conclude, current challenging time calls for deeper reflections, creative ideas and experimentations.

Different types of organizations from the well-established brands to new solo entrepreneurs can benefit from systematic trend spotting and scanning activities. Trend analysis provides opportunities to rethink the strategies, ways of operating and the overall offerings. In the end, regardless of your motivation and interests, you can take a proactive role in sensemaking and ideating an inspiring future.

Written by:

Nina Kostamo Deschamps, SID 2016

Innovation Designer & Change Facilitator at Accenture Interactive

twitter.com/NinaDeNapapiiri

The importance of routines

Jun9

I participated on 28.5.2020 in a digital event focusing on organizational change and service design. The four-hour-event was hosted by Livework studio, an international service design company, and Delft University of Technology, technological university in Delft, Netherlands.

The event had two keynote presentations. The first keynote speaker was Professor Brian Pentland from Michigan State University, a pioneer in routine dynamics. Second keynote talk about service design aspect was brought by Marzia Arico and Jan Koenders from Livework studio. Rest of the afternoon was spent in round-table discussions and breakout rooms, ending with a open discussion to sum up the day.

In addition to service design, the focus of the event was organizational changes, science of routines and especially the idea of routine dynamics, a branch of research on routines, and the stability and change behind it.

Understanding organizational changes and routines inside an organization is vital for any service designer, especially from the point of view of implementing a new, designed service. Livework studio’s Director of Design Marzia Arico and Senior Design consultant Jan Koenders talked about the common frustration that service designers face.

“51% of service design projects run by Service Design agencies never get implemented.”
– Marzio Arico, Livework studio

“Corporate entertainment”, as Arico called it, is when you’re only generating ideas to entertain organization’s innovation department but never actually implementing them. The lack of impact in their work can be frustrating and demoralizing to service designers.

Understanding organizational change and routines allows service designers to boost the probability of a successful implementation. Arico and Koenders introduced a four-layer-approach to battling implementation problems: capability building, doing, learning and adopting.

Through establishing routines, constant reiterations and feedback and careful training, it is possible for the organization to adopt the new, designed service into their “business as usual”. The presence of routine is vital in the approach, as it makes sure that changes are not just done in paper, but also in practice.

Slide from Livework studio’s Marzia Arico’s and Jan Koenders’ presentation

Key take-aways:

Routines: don’t deliver only frameworks and materials, but also provide thorough coaching
Collaboration: hands-on collaboration within teams encourages new routines being used with actual customers

My first touch with design thinking and why it was so difficult to write about it

Jan23

Design Thinking workshop on September 7th 2019 at Laurea Leppävaara campus
Photo credits: Bento Haridas

The journey of writing this blog post

I have written this blog post so many times and felt so insecure and confused what to write about. The assignment for the Design Thinking course was to read couple of articles and books and reflect on your own learnings.

Over and over again, I have read my notes from our workshop days from September 2019, facilitated and lectured by Katja Tschimmel. I have also read her article “Design Thinking as an effective toolkit for innovation” and a book “Design Thinking for strategic innovation – What they can’t teach you at business or design school”. I have had good discussions with my colleagues, at work (you know who you are) and in the SID program.

I have familiarized myself with the different Design Thinking models and in general why and how design methods can be used creatively in solving any problems, regardless of the context. I have learned that it is a great tool to frame the problem and find the right problem to be solved. The variety of Design Thinking tools can be used by anyone, you don’t have to be a designer or creative person to use those tools.

In organizations, Design Thinking approach and tools work well in gathering people together across the organizational silos. Bringing people together regardless of the background and helping people to discuss and share thoughts in supporting and safe environment was one of the important things I noted down. I also learned that Design Thinking allows people to try different solutions, even if they do not know if this is the right one or right direction. Design Thinking accepts and encourages people to learn through making failures. The well known benefit of that in business world is that making failures quickly actually makes the development timeline shorter and that way cheaper.

Photo source: Design Thinking for strategic innovation – What they can’t teach you at business or design school, page 37.

Getting in touch with feelings is hard

Before the workshop, I knew some theory and benefits of Design Thinking. But only through the personal experience and quite many months of mental processing I have started to understand why it has been so difficult to write about Design Thinking. The playful methods and way of working together co-creatively was just so much fun. I actually felt something.

For many reasons, I have been used to just rely on my rational, logical and analytical thinking at work, working in a big corporate with big corporates in solving their challenges as a management consultant. But this approach touched and opened something in my heart and I could also use my ability to feel to solve the problem we worked with in the workshop.

People have natural need to be in connection with people, to work with people, feel that they are part of something. Especially in large organizations people can feel very lonely. Design Thinking brings people together and makes you feel you are part of something.

When organizations and people face changes, very often people feel fear of the coming change. Fear again makes people to fight or run away, or in a very difficult situation, paralyze. Organizations are in a constant change, and change happens fast. I feel that Design Thinking is powerful tool to address the change, to plan the changes together and go through the journey together. You will still need to make your research to understand the needs of your customers, make a business case for the change, you need to get people onboard to the change, you will need to find technological solutions, you need to figure out the operating model and design efficient processes. Design Thinking is a new perspective to add on. That’s why it makes so much sense in organizations to use design methods.

The power of of Design Thinking is definitely in the psychological side, among the many others such as giving tools for ordinary people in organizations to be creative and innovative and making organizations more human places to work in.

I will end this post by sending lots of hugs and kisses to everyone who reads this post! Let’s be brave and make organizations good places to work in ❤

23.1.2020 by Katriina Granlund

This adorable panda bear is not in any way related to the design thinking workshop. I was having lunch at Roots kitchen in the charming old Turku market hall one day, and they use these animal figures instead of regular numbers to bring the food to the correct table after order. Such a nice idea!

Is Design Thinking a magical cure-all?

Sep29

Change as a Challenge

The internet and with it the digitization and growing technological achievements are changing our world. Of course, change is nothing new; industries and companies have to face change every day through competition and innovation. Mootee describes, all companies must endure change to survive or grow (Mootee, 2013, p.124), but the change we’ve been experiencing for a while now, is particularly fast and influential. We are living in an age where change is reshaping industries and categories (Mootee, 2013, p.124) with great impact, bringing opportunities that we can exploit for growth, but also risks that can lead to an existential threat if we are not sensing it early enough and respond to it properly.

Change is not the problem, but the challenge businesses have to overcome. The problem or danger, like Mootee describes it, lies in applying theories and practices based on outdated models of two or three decades ago (Mootee, 2013, p.99). As these practices and theories are outdated, they often cannot provide an adequate response to today’s challenges. More than 80 percent of our management tools, systems, and techniques are for value-capture efforts, not for value creation; (Mootee, 2013, p.75). This is a problem if a business wants to compete with other companies who can create and offer new values, which are requested by customers in this new landscape.

Design Thinking as a Solution

Design thinking is an approach everybody can use, to find a proper response with new alternatives and ideas we need (Brown, 2009) to create new values. Because design thinking is promising, some business leaders gazing hopefully towards design thinking as the next management “wonder drug” (Mootee, 2013, p.35). The hope of helping one’s own business to new heights with this seemingly playful approach is tempting. But the hype surrounding design thinking makes some people overlook the fact that this approach is not just hanging sticky notes to fancy walls in colorful spaces. Design thinking’s association with or applications in business is often way oversimplified (Mootee, 2013, p.54) and that can raise false hopes. Business leaders must understand the context before designing and implementing any change program (Mootee, 2013, p.124) and this is an important part of design thinking.

Essential parts of Design Thinking in E.6² design by Mindshake

To learn design thinking properly it is useful to participate in a design thinking workshop as I did during my design thinking class at Laurea University. Katja Tschimmel, who is a design thinking coach taught us various models and tools, which we were able to put into practice together in groups. Using the methods with divergent and convergent phases was important because a big part of design thinking is design doing (Mootee, 2013, p.80). It is a process where you learn in collaboration with the others and like Katja Tschimmel said you copy and adapt and adaption is necessary in times of change.

My Experience with Design Thinking

As a designer who has been working in this field for almost 4 years, design thinking is not something new. I know the advantages of including customers in the process or methods like prototyping. I didn’t expect to hear much new, but as a designer, you still can have eye-opening moments while learning about design thinking. The course broadened my perspective, reminded me of things that had already faded into my subconscious and sharpened my terminology and methodology.

A Valuable Practice

Design thinking is far from a magical cure-all (Mootee, 2013, p.35), but a valuable practice to sense change, to find opposing ideas and constraints who lead to new solutions (Brown, 2009, 4:00), redefined values up to new business models. It is an approach that can replace outdated practices and theories to face today’s challenges properly.

Author: Bento Orlando Haridas – September 2019

References

Mootee, I. 2013. Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: What They Can’t Teach You at Business or Design School: Wiley.
Brown, T. 2008. Design Thinking: Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes – and even strategy.: Harvard Business Review
Tim Brown. 2009. Design Thinking: TED Talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=J0ZbVAQ8bWI

Utopia or Dystopia? How is the Future Looking like in Service Design?

Sep27

By Salla Kuuluvainen
I recently attended two events which made me think about futures thinking and it’s relation to service design and innovation. Innovation, by definition, is an act that reaches towards the future, and and engages the innovator in creating a future that may be something they wish for.. or not. How can we as innovators and service designers engage in creating those desirable futures?

50 years from 1968

I attended an event in Tiedekulma where the year 1968 was discussed. I went there, not because my studies of service design, but because I’m interested in changing the world, and when younger, also identified as an activist. One of the speakers, Johanna Vuorelma, a historian, claimed that politics in today’s world no longer are utopistic. In 1968 there was a real sense of trying to build a better, different world from previous’ generations’ with a World War and its horrors.

I could agree on that. The revolutionaries and activists of today no longer reach for a desirable future, instead they try to preserve something of old: a somewhat habitable planet or a shred of human rights, or a homeland that looks like in 1950`s if they are active in the conservative movements. So activism today may look like the same thing as
in the crazy year of 1968, but actually the drivers and motivators behind the actions may be very different.

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Futurist as Designer

Another event I attended during Helsinki Design Week was Futures Talks, organized by Futures Specialists Helsinki. In the event we heard many different ideas and scenarios for future, some more positive than others. The idea that impacted me the most had to do with design thinking. The organizers discussed the idea of designing our futures, meaning that studies of the futures thinking is not just a passive act of trying predict what will happen – instead a we should see how each of our actions and choices creates the future in this very moment.
In conclusion of these two events I thought that maybe utopistic thinking does not happen in the realm of activism and politics anymore, but that sometimes more optimism and positive energy for change can be found around events that discuss design and innovation. Our final task at the event by FSH was to create a future wall with post-it notes about our personal utopias, dystopias or protopias – protopia meaning a world that is better by a small, achievable change. Maybe Service Design is actually just about that – creating a protopia for our everyday lives.

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How might we design for change?

Oct8

“Reading aloud is an important tool to plant the love of reading in children”, said Rana Dajani explainng her idea of We Love Reading in the innovation platform: Open IDEO.

We Love Reading is an initiative to hold read-aloud sessions in refugee camps that encourages women, men and youth to be leaders in their communities by setting up read aloud sessions. These sessions are done by the people of the camp themselves within the vicinity of the tents. Children not only enjoy the storytelling experience in their own language and culture but, it is also a capacity building tool for adults in the camp that give them a sense of purpose there.

You might hear about this initiative because it has been elected by UNESCO as an effective education program and they also participated in WISE Congress last year.

The initiative already has a pilot in the Zaatai refugee camp of Jordan, where thousands of Syrian refugees live and it is one of the top ideas of the Openideo challenge: How might we improve education and expand learning opportunities for refugees around the world?

What is OpenIDEO?

Along with the challenge of refugee education, on OpenIDEO you can find many others calls, all of them starting with How might we…? OpenIDEO is a design thinking methodology platform where “people from all corners of the world, no matter who they are, collaboratively tackle some of the toughest global issues bringing their experience and unique perspective to the conversation and development of ideas.”

What is Design Thinking?

In Tim Brown’s words it is “a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos”. The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products, services or experiences that will improve lives.

Design thinking tools are such as empathy and getting out into the world to be inspired by people, diverged and converged thinking, synthesis as a capacity to frame insight, using prototyping to learn with your hands, creating stories to share ideas, visual thinking, joining forces with people from other disciplines.

Some of its principles include working by building on the ideas of others, collaboration, bridging the knowing-doing gap, interdisciplinary teams and a systematic approach to take challenges through inspiration, to ideation, implementation of the idea and iterating along the process.

Wrapping the story

OpenIDEO is a tangible opportunity to apply the design thinking framework to global problems at this critical point where rapid change is forcing us to look not only to new ways of solving problems but to new problems to solve. All local communities around the world are facing these global challenges in their own places.

Along with the We Love Reading idea, on OpenIDEO you can find 400 research contributions to the challenge of improving refugee education, 376 ideas were developed collaboratively and 7 top ideas will eventually be funded. The impact of these ideas will take place in refugee communities and it also has an inspirational impact on the ideas of others that we are not yet able to measure but we should not underestimate.

Carmen Moles
Service Innovation and Design MBA Student

Research and sources:

Brown, Tim 2009. Change by design: how design thinking can transform organizations and inspire innovation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Tschimmel, Katja 2012. Design Thinking as an effective Toolkit for Innovation. In: Proceedings of the XXIII ISPIM Conference: Action for Innovation: Innovating from Experience. Barcelona.

http://www.academia.edu/1906407/Design_Thinking_as_an_effective_Toolkit_for_Innovation

Brown, Tim 2008. Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review, June, 84-95.

http://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/thoughts/IDEO_HBR_Design_Thinking.pdf

OpenIDEO challenges.openideo.com

We Love Reading Project www.welovereading.org

Photo credit

How do you react when you face change, uncertainty and chaos?

Nov13

How many people we have in this room? This was the first question asked in our workshop with the topic Leading through change, uncertainty and chaos. At that time I didn’t have any clue what we’re going to do in this workshop. So, there were 15 people and we were asked to divide in to two groups with same amount of women and men and we had to make sure that we don’t know each other before.

‘Here are instructions for the game we’re going to play today. Read them carefully together outside of the room in ten minutes and make sure everyone knows the rules of the game when you come back’, our workshops facilitator said. Ok, so we’re going to play some game here, I thought and we went to read the instructions. Because of the limited time, one of us, read them aloud and rest of tried to understand the idea of the game. I was confused, I didn’t understand what the game was all about, it sounded like chess, but with different rules.

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Service Innovation & Design

Studying in the SID Master's programme at Laurea