Tag Archive | Conference

Service Experience Trail – from MS Digital Eatery to Deutche Bank 101 concept

Nov15

I participated the Service Experience Camp 2015 during 12 – 14 November in Berlin.

On the preceeding day of the actual Camp event, I walked the optional 2,5 hours trail in Berlin Mitte with other Experience Camp participants. We got introduced to 4 particular retail spaces.

We started with the Microsoft Digital Eatery, a combination of a café and a showroom. One could try out latest Microsoft hardware and software while sipping a latte or eating a delicious sandwich. There was also an XBOX play corner with sofas and large screens. The Microsoft personnel on the spot can help out with problems or further direct clients to maintenance services and they arrange workshops on their new products and services.

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Next stop was the travel agency TUI’s branch which together with 500 other branches owned by Tui group have adopted a concept of a more personal and comfortable travel booking. The branch had a nice open space consisting of a lounge area, a bar, a library area to browse books on travel destinations and the personnel counters that were visible throughout the space. The personnel uses ipads when discussing with the customers of their travel desires on the lounge area. The purpose is to offer the right service in a short time and in comfortable settings. Important part of the concept is to contact the customer after the trip to discuss whether they were satisfied and to get feedback on improvements.

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In Ritter Sport we had a tour of the store starting with the entrance where one could order a tailor made chocolate bar to be taken with when exiting the store. Downstairs Ritter would have facilities for organizing chocolate workshops for kids, a concept that has been so popular they started giving workshops to adults, too.

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Last stop was to Deutsche Bank’s 101 concept store in the luxus brands’ street in Berlin’s Mitte – a mix of retail banking services, exposition space for partners, concierge service, a café and a customer lab. Deutche Bank has had this concept since the financial crisis of 2008. They wanted to rebuild trust with retail customers and bring something surprising adding more value to the customer visiting the branch. Currently the partner co-using the space is Harrod’s, selling christmas inspirated goodies and products. In the middle of the space there is a lounge area called customer lab, being used to introduce online services to customers and to workshop on service development with customers. On one side of the space the ATM’s are lined up and they use a specific identification method of veins’ recognition to those who have adopted this method of identification. On the same side with ATMs there are bank counters which are very minimalistic, all the banking affairs are done standing with the bank personnel. On the back of the space there is a cozy café with childrens’ play area and spaces for informal meetings with customers. There are also three differently decorated negociation rooms, targeted to young customers, families and young entrepreneurs. And finally a concierge service that can help out for example in customers’ travel or gift arrangements or even give advice to tourists! Quite a versatile concept and a very thorough tour that we received.

Women in Tech 2015 – match-making across industries to discover hot spots of innovation!

Nov12

Women in Tech 2015 was arranged on 7th October in Helsinki with the theme “Make a difference!” and lured women of all ages with an interest in the future of business and technology to participate.

The guest speakers Stephanie Keller-Bottom and Tammy Noll motivated us as women to be the change we want to see.

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Besides talking on the issue of women in tech, Stephanie introduced current trends of which corporate venturing standed out to me – that corporations are developing startup mentality and launching projects inside corporations. Tammy encouraged us to have more tolerance for risk of failure and more resilience. We should “fall gracefully” and move on with our focus – with devotion.

After the speeches I participated a nicely organized and lead workshop by Tieto Experience Hub’s Ksenia Avetisova and Fanny Vakkila on the theme Industry match-making as a strategic tool for innovation.

Tieto is approaching innovation and design with strategy driven collaborative models, engaging in the strategic themes of gamification of health, medializing commerce and energizing economy. They believe that innovations with breakthrough potential can be discovered in the hot spots between industries, companies and cultures. The goal is to create maximum impact and superior customer experience.

In the workshop we were divided into 8 teams. We started off with sharing our “superpowers” .

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TOMORROW is being made today

Jun23

Tomorrow conference

Tomorrow conference was held at Helsinki music centre on 10th of June 2015.

I as a student had the privilege to attend to this thought-provoking and networking event with world-class speakers from diverse fields. Thanks to Lauri Ahonen, the event organizer and the front seat guests that made the participation for students possible.

For those of you that where not able to participate, I share some of the messages from few of the speakers.

FACING UNCERTAINTY

Pekka Haavisto, a Green member of Finnish Parliament and Member of Committee for Foreign Affairs, opened the conference. He encouraged us to know other continents cultures better by being open minded, exploring the world and stepping into the shoes of foreigners to see the world from the different angles. It was a good message to export field – knowing the culture and its people is the first priority to have successful business abroad.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan and Antifragile, raised issues like how companies that love errors are more likely to gain in the world where uncertainty is reality. When competition is everywhere the least expected happenings, the side-effects, can more often be the ones that lead to new business. Those that concentrate to lowering risks are also lowering their variability which means in the long run that their are dropping they ability to survival. Too centralized big countries, companies or projects are more fragile than the small ones.

For individual point of view I see that being always curious to new things, doing many things you love in life, having many incomes from different fields makes you strong and “antifragile”.

MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN

Write the futureTuuti Piippo, the author of Futuremakers, spread positive energy when describing the hero`s journey.

You do not need to know everything, but you definitely need to have the passion to learn. Everybody can be a hero. You need to have the courage to explore exciting things that you may be little scared off. Ask a lot of questions to learn and be humble to ask help. Then you need to be strong enough to go through the challenges in the journey where you are making failures and standing up again and again. I love her attitude.

I think her message raises a question for all of us: Are you the hero, the pilot, of your own life or just passenger?

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Service Design Global Conference 2014 Experience

Oct12

SDNThis is my experience from the Service Design Global Conference 2014 in Stockholm 7-8th October with the topic Creating value for quality of life. Because I arrived to Stockholm already on Monday 6th October for participating to pre-events the experience for me was three full days of inspiration and learning. Those days included many interesting talks and speakers and most of them were very inspiring. Couple practical workshops where I had the opportunity to try new methods. Meeting new people and have great discussions with them. Sharing ideas and knowledge and learning from others. The best part was that I could do all that with many of my fellow students what made this experience even better for me. I was surprised how much energy you can get from the people who share the same interest: Service Design. Here are some of my takeaways from the conference.

WorkshopHow we can improve quality of life with the Service Design? and how we can make the difference with it? First of all it needs lots of changes in organizations. Good question was that where should Service Design belong in organization and the answer was simply: everywhere. We should start from the top when we want to start change in the organization, but at the same time we need to prove the power of Service Design for all levels. One suggestion was that we could start introducing Service Design with some small easy project which is easy to make it real fast after ideation. That would be practical way to show how it works and that it really works. Stop thinking, start doing someone said in the panel discussion and I believe that is what we need to do.

We need also good measurements to show the results of the Service Design. We heard many interesting ideas about that and I found particularly Nathan Schedroff’s talk about total value very interesting. We should remember that the customers appreciate more qualitative values when business looks more about quantitative values. In the end of the day quantitative values; price and function, is only the top of the ice-berg when we are looking the total value.

panel discussionRelated to changes in the organizations, very interesting topic in the conference and I think a hot topic in otherwise also at the moment is the employee engagement. Before we can make difference with the Service Design we need corporate culture which enables employees to do so. I think it is quite obvious for many that happy employees means happy customers. And eventually that means better results for the company, but how many companies really put efforts to that? We heard very inspiring talk from Mark Levy from Airbnb when he told how they are doing it at Airbnb. Especially I liked the goldfish rule which he presented that love your customers and employees like yourself, do little extras and give little bit more.

This blog post is a part of SID course The Current Topics in Service Design and it’s written by SID student Minna Myyryläinen.

Transformation Through Service Design – Service Design Global Conference 2013

Nov26

“Is service design more in love with the process than the outcome? Do we want to be defined by processes, or outcomes and impact?” Lee Sankley provoked the audience in the Wales Millenium Center last Tuesday.

Unlike the singers and dancers that usually take the impressive stage, Lee Sankley is group design director at finance company Barclays. He spoke to an audience of over 400 people who had gathered in Cardiff from November 18 to 20 to discuss the future of service design at the 6th Service Design Global Conference. For three days the Welsh capital was humming with a mix of over 50 talks and workshops, discussions, networking and drinking.

Opening of the Service Design Global Conference 2013

Opening of SDNC13 (Photo by sprmario)

Big data and little data

Data was a principal theme of the conference. Not few were surprised when Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research pointed out how much data every one of us produces daily. More than creating original content data is also produced by sharing details with providers, receiving information from organizations and recorded data such as search queries or credit scores. As more and more information gets digitalized and sensors capture different aspects of life, we face big data which is more than humans can process. Only a small fraction of this data is used. An excellent showcase for use of big data to drive actionable insights came from Maria José Jorda Garcia of BBVA. Commerce 360 lets shop owners compare their store performance to others in the same area or sector based on financial transactions. From these insights a number of new business ideas can be derived.

However, according to Kerry Bodine a majority of organizations find it difficult to handle unstructured data in large volumes. Furthermore, she emphasized the importance of qualitative data for an understanding of the underlying reasons. In some cases little data is even more valuable for less cost and often it goes hand-in-hand with big data. Quantitative data can serve to validate findings of qualitative research while attaching numbers and currency to deliverables can help to make the business case for service design. Erik Roscam Abbing of Zilver Innovation showed an example of a customer journey map that uses quantitative data to allocate where the biggest pain is.

On the second day, Marion Fröhlich and Mauro Rego shared a method for creating actionable data dashboards in an interactive workshop. Because the visible part of the service is a result of many steps in the background, they stressed the importance of streamlining the back office. SAP’s innovative database system HANA supports decision making by putting relevant data at your fingertips in real time. SAP Design and Co-Innovation Center has developed a process that starts by analyzing roles and activities to determine which insights are most critical in key moments. After identifying the most relevant KPIs and triggers for action we got our hands on paper prototyping a sample dashboard.

Kerry Bodine warns that we are data illiterate and risk to draw the wrong conclusions from big data. She emphasizes the growing need to become fluent in big data and educate how data informs design.

In-house and external

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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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Design day from the designers to the designers

Oct14

I participated in the Reaktor’s first Design day on 3rd of October in Helsinki and it took place in event center Telakka. Reaktor is a Finnish design & software house. Design day was great opportunity for me to learn and to share ideas with other participants. The whole event was very inspirational and energetic and I have to say that the arrangements for the day were excellent. Here are the speeches which I picked from the program.

The day started with Ryan Singer’s speech about “How to focus your product design”. Ryan is a leader at 37signals which has made for example a project management tool Basecamp. Next speaker was Henrik Rydberg from Shapeways . He talked about “Failceed”, that it is OK to fail when you’re creating something new and it is necessary when creating something new. Creativity needs safe place for play and find out was it good idea.

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A Sneak Peek into Palmu Inc. Society

Nov23
The Palmu Society Service Design Seminar was held on the 13th of November at the Korjaamo Culture Factory in Helsinki. The event was a closed seminar for Palmu Inc.’s clients and their clients. Event organiser Palmu Inc. is a Finnish service design based organisation. Here’s how they define themselves: Palmu Inc. is the fastest growing service design agency in Europe. Palmu specializes in spurring service business growth through service design. We identify the sources of customer value and apply this insight to designing new service concepts, digital channels, and real-world encounters. 

ICSSME2012 conference greetings!

Oct24

by Dr. Päivi J Tossavainen

Regards from the ICSSME2012 conference. ICSSME2012 is a newcomer conference of service research field. Organized by World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET), the conference took place October 8-9 in Dubai, UAE. There were about 100 participants in the event from countries around the world.

Regina&Josna

Track host Regina Graml with the presenter Josna Raphael from India.

The two days provided an extensive amount of research discussions on various topics. Continue reading →

Service Design meets Futures Thinking – IN ACTION

Oct22
Before our 2nd blog post for the series of Service Design meets Futures Thinking, we have a special news for you !

The first test environment for combining Futures Thinking with Design Thinking takes place in Helsinki in two weeks ! This is an invitation to all design thinkers, futures thinkers, strategic minds and innovative leaders to take part in the day on Friday 9th November at the heart of Helsinki, Finland – The World Design Capital 2012.

LaFutura is here ! Continue reading →