CPH127

I just came across (I got it from Ideas Flow) an "old" Dave Pollard post (its from July 19th) about why innovation services are so hard to sell. It’s a really interesting read, so I recommend you read the whole piece if you haven’t all ready!

Basically Pollard points to 4 major reasons Innovation consultants have difficulties selling their services:

1. People don´t like change. Ususally change is forced upon a company (e.g. in a business merger) and so change is reaction. It takes enormous courage to be proactive and decide to put yourself and your people through potentially gut-wrenching change when you not absolutely have to (or before you have to).
2. Everyone thinks they can do it themselves. When a company accepts that innovation is needed
   there is generally a sense of collective embarrassment, and a
   groupthink quickly sets in that says "we got ourselves into this, we
   have lots of creative minds here, we can get ourselves out of it".(…)There’s great
   skepticism that innovation consulting is a real discipline. An
   innovation ‘facilitator’ may be acceptable, to provide some structure
   and process to the company’s efforts to solve its own problems, but
   what outsider would be arrogant enough to presume they could tell a
   company how to transform itself into something very new and different?
3. It’s a dragon issue, so it involves a lot of trust. It’s frightening to open your kimono to a stranger. You have to admit
   that without innovation there is (or will soon be) a huge problem in
   your organization.
4. It requires understanding of how and why the market has moved without you. Successful businesses have found a need and filled it, and are often
   intensely customer focused. When you need to innovate, that means those
   customers you’ve got so close to and so comfortable with are somehow
   unhappy with you (or alternatively are much happier with your
   competitor). This is hard to come to grips with, (partly) because it’s difficult and to start looking at your customers and
   market through a strange new perspective — which is where you have to
   start if you really want to innovate.

Pollard argues that the first three ones are hard to copy with as a consultant. You just have to wait for the company to take the initiative. While you do, make sure to keep the dialogue going and build credentials. The fourth issue on the other hand is really where innovation consultants can bring their competencies into play and differentiate themselves from traditional marketing consultants.

It is
through looking at the patterns in customers’ stories that we can
provide our clients with a startlingly different and enormously useful
picture of the market and its direction — the most valuable input into
an innovation strategy that anyone can offer.

If this (customer research, future scenario) is our point of entry (and we deliver) we might be able to overcome the first three issues and get the trust needed to engage in further collaboration.

Do you recognise the picture that Pollard paints? Do you have any other "point of entry" services (one I come to think of is Innovation Audit) that is good to suggest to start-up a client relationship with?

A Fast Company post (I got it from Putting people first) put some additional fuel on my "I´ve-got-an-issue-with-corporate-branding" fire.

New technologies (like Shadow and MyWeb 2.0) makes it even more easy for communities to share their views on a company and/or it´s products. Technology like this "represent a huge threat to corporations that try to control how their
brands are perceived. After all, if you can leave a comment about
crappy service or shoddy products on a company’s shadow page - out of
the company’s reach but right there for all to see — the power of
information vs. perception shifts firmly in the consumer’s direction."

This is indeed interesting. According to, what I would call the "information/marketing strategy of the industrial age" the corporate brand needs to be controled in such a manner that talking about your actual hands-on experience with the company or the product is considered a threat! This is where the defensive, re-active attributes of corporate branding shows its ugly face, and the irony of it all becomes clear.

I believe that the fact that the company has a corporate branding strategy that has to be controlled is the very same reason the community of customers has something to complain about. To simplify it; If the money that went into the corporate branding budget would have been poured into product and service development, customer service and product/service marketing the case would have been the opposite. Then the customers would have less to complain about and the company would have less to control (which would create a cost-cut as well).

As the power of perception moves in behind the wheel and corporations figure out that the voice of the customers acctually is the most important resource they have if they want to have any hopes of prospering in the future, a new "dialogue/collaboration strategy of the knowledge or conceptual age" is needed. But what would such a role, activity or discipline look like? What would the chief information and/or marketing manager of tomorrow do for a living?

We live in a Google world. Information/answers/solutions await us. We want to search, and so other people want to label, categorize, classify. New (and horrific) words like folksonomy emerge to describe the schemes by which we can sort and label the world around us.

I don’t disagree that there is power in being able to give something a name, and then a definition, to ensure that groups of people can converse together. Of course, creating common language can have the opposite effect - a shibboleth being a word that establishes membership in a group (if you know it, you’re in, if not, you are out) - obviously shibboleth is itself a shibboleth.

I grew up, professionally, as an interface/usability/interaction person. But I resisted classification, no doubt to the detriment of my own skill development and employment prospects. People wanted to know if I was designer, a tester, a visual person, a graphic person, a programmer, or what? I was none of those things, but I still had skills. I just didn’t know how to package them and describe them within the terms that were in use. Ironically, as I moved away from that field during the early days of the web (when the field boomed enormously) the definitions and roles exploded - but it has only become worse. Now we see terms like IA (information architecture), UE (user experience), UX (also user experience), UCD (user-centered design) (and many more) and then all the groups (here, here, here) that emerge to try to fix all the cultural problems that result. And guess what many of the discussions inevitably end up focusing on? What is {IA/UE/UX/UCD/etc.}? It seems a painful cycle of self-definition and then regrouping.

This obviously holds appeal for some and enables them to work with words and ideas to really nail down what is important, in order to best define, and then implement, the key offerings.

Personally, it makes me twitch. I just can’t deal with it.

I recently posted details of an upcoming webcast about ethnography to the Discovery mailing list and received the following reply

After reading the info on it - it reminded me of how frequently the terms "ethnographic research" and "in-context research" (and other variations) are used interchangeably .  I’ve tried to distinguish ethnography from in-context interviewing by explaining that in-context interviewing tends to include more direct questions and directed behavior than ethnography.

I have tried to sidestep these details in my conversations with people because I’m not sure how it helps to debate what is "ethnography" and what isn’t? I try to focus on the overall process which I’m involved in:

Examine users (consumers or other) in their own context

• What are they doing (“usage”)

• What does it mean

Infer (interpret/synthesize/etc.)

• Find the connections

• The ethnographer is the “apparatus”

Apply to business or design problems

• Use products, services, packaging, design to tell the right story

And what about us here? Seems like we’re establishing a common vocabularly, common sources, interests, disciplines, passions, and inspirations, without worrying too much about design management, innovation, strategy, business, design thinking, or whatever. I’ll point to About, With, and For (Hi Brianna!) as a conference that has been successful while deliberately staying away from the navel-gazing self-definition and getting on with the business of what it is we’re about. I like the forward momentum of this community and I’m happy without too much definition, as long as there’s alignment. And I believe there is.

Am I right when saying that many designers faces BIG problems when asked to prove the economical effects of their designs?

John Heskett writes about it and I can say that I’m lucky to meet him during INDEX:2005

               

I want to argue two points:
firstly, for design to be taken seriously in business terms, we must
demonstrate how it can create – and not just add – economic value by
developing innovative ideas capable of opening up new markets;
secondly, economic ideas are a valuable source of support for such
arguments.

Read more.

Do you have THE powerpont-slide with THE argument to persuade the customer? Want to share?

Over at "Does Size Matter" there is a very interesting discussion on how you should/could organize as a design firm.

She (UPDATE - She=Niti:-) questions whether you should be a BIG company to gain the trust of the customer or a little small and agile group of people – a network maybe.

One of the perspectives she brings on board is the “Hold-up” problem.

If you are a company – how do you see that, any experiences?

If you are a design-related-network-delivery-type-of-guy – how do you see that, any experiences?

During the last year there has been a lot of discussion in Denmark around how to cope with the globalisation – until now the governments answer has been the “Technology, Research and Innovation Fund”, which is to support strategic efforts in areas like information and communications technology, bio-technology and nano-technology.

But if you ask one of Denmark’s leading experts in globalisation, Anders Drejer, a professor of strategic management and business development at the Aarhus School of Business, this Fund is a huge mistake if the goal is to improve the possibilities for Danish businesses in a globalised world.
”It is a bad idea to pour 16 billion kroner into a high-tech fund. First of all, high-tech research targets industrial companies. This means that one would be promoting research that belongs in a different age. At least it has little to do with actively pursuing a knowledge society. Secondly, one is totally following in the footsteps of the Asian countries that are currently pouring billions into the high-tech sector. China, for example, is betting so massively on nano-technology that already today every second international research article in this field is written by a Chinese scientist,” says Anders Drejer.

If it were up to him, Denmark would seek its own path instead of trudging along in the same direction as a lot of other nations.

”Denmark should position itself in between Asia and the USA. Let the East handle industrial mass-production, and let the USA handle global marketing and branding. Instead, go for the development of business concepts and design. Compared with high-tech there is much more perspective in going for that mix of good business acumen and design that we have seen in Bang & Olufsen and Bestseller, or in the Danish plastics industry, which has done a phenomenal job of linking up with large global companies with clever solutions.”

What solutions has been chosen in your countries – how do you cope with the new challenges?

Read more.

• Strategos - Helping Companies Innovate and Grow
  Gary Hamel is the Chair of Strategos - I cant figure out if they bring new things on the table. Find out your self…
  (tags: Garyhamel strategy consultant implementation hanshenrik innovation process)

As a product, urban design ranges in scale from parts of an
environment, such as a streetscape, to the larger wholes of districts,
towns, cities, or regions. Urban design is manifest in all aspects of
the physical environment, including form, space, movement, time,
activity patterns, and setting. The urban design of a place involves
what the place looks like, how it feels, what it means, and how it
works for people who use it. Among other things, the urban designer is
concerned with the sensory and cognitive relationships between people
and their environment, with how people’s needs, values, and aspirations
can best be accommodated in built forms.

Got it here.

Few days ago I had - together with Magnus - a short conversation with the Chairman of the Board of Danish Design Centre – Steffen Gulmann.

We talked about a new book he is writing about Design in City planning. The user centred kind.

I’ve been reflecting a lot since our meeting – there is definitely business opportunity here. And browsing the web motivated me to write this post – I didn’t exactly find what I searched: showcases on how to use design in urban development. Do you know any?

• UXnet Blog
  Got the link while surfing for experiencedesign - interesting to se how they have organized their work
  (tags: usercentric experience blog hanshenrik design)

• Activity Theory and User-centered Design (Andrew Otwell)
  (tags: jacob design hci research activity_theory usercentric)