Crowd-sourcing is a buzz word that has been overused, but little has been said and researched about what it can really do for a project. What happens when you involve your clients and partners into the creation of new products and services? What is possible to outsource, what is not? Does involving your community into every process scale?
- Speakers:
- Steve Portigal, Discover and act on new insights about how people innovate.
- Nick Coates, Co-creation: present and future.
- Thomas Sutton, Relinquishing Control: creating space for open innovation.
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Steve Portigal, Discover and act on new insights about how people innovate.
Some of the best ways of understanding what customers want or need is often surprisingly indirect.
- Examine people, ideally in their own context – gather stories, what they are doing, what does it mean?
- Synthesize the stories – find patterns and connections
- Apply to business and design problems: create new stories that frame how an organisations talks and thinks; use products, services, packaging, design to manifest that new story in the marketplace
Examine using a range of methods
- Interview – “Tell me what you do”
- Tasks – “Draw me a map of your computer network”
- Participation – “Show me how you make a Whopper”
- Demonstration – “Show me how to make that cake”
- Role play – “Let me be your customer. What do you do?”
- Logging – Note what someone is doing at regular intervals
- Homework – particiapnt saves thoughts for discussion
- Stimuli – Review wireframes, prototypes
- Exercises – “What is in your wallet?”, “Draw your ideal solution”
Consider the difference between testing and exploring
- Don’t say, “Do you like this?”
- Don’t show YOUR best guess at a solution, identify proviocative examples that surface hidden desires, expectations.
- Ask what the solution enables.
While we always uncover ‘pain points‘ the bigger opportunity may come from understanding WHY we got there in the first place.
Satisficing, refers to our acceptance of good enough solutions. Check out http://thereifixedit.com Large corporate software companies, and especially their marketing and engineering teams, are REALLY, REALLY bad at understanding this.
Talk to people you want to design for but also consider lots of other points of views and triangulate. What about the people that don’t use what you want top buiild, or don’t do. What does your solution enable.
All this stuff is really practical, teachable, understandable BUT, the biggest issue comes when you force your organisation through a cultural shift to embrace this internally.
- A shift in what we think the customer’s problem is
- A shift in what we think the solution is
- Get comfortable with ambiguity in the organisation
To change your organisational culture you need to do story-worthy things.
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Nick Coates, Co-creation: present and future.
Nick did a Phd in Literary theory in the modern French Carribean novel.
Co-creation has been around for a long time even though people haven’t necessarily talked about it in that way.
6 Guiding principles of Co-Creation.
- No Spectators! Participants only. Burning Man.
- Diversity rules. Bletchley Park
- Humility is the mother of co-creation. Open Source.
- Involve your users. Literary theory.
- Size of listening = Size of speaking. Group psychology.
- The answer ISN’T already out there. Psychotherapy
Co-creation is not:
- Mass customisation – you are choosing from pre-determined options
- It is not Open Innovation – still has
- Not crowdsourcing – that is outsourcing
Three Cs of co-creation
- Creativity – focus on outcomes, non-rational focus, reaching new places, adopting ‘creative’ approaches
- Collaboration – interactivity, snowballing, real-time component, social element
- Control – purposive and facilitated
The future is co-connected
- Audience – more representative, inclusive & more diverse
- Geography – bottom of the pyramid, the developing world gets involved.
- Channel – more hybrids, more multi-channel, utilising the power of smart computing nad the cloud
Four risks of co-creation
- Ownership – who owns co-creation and who owns IP. How are people incentivised?
- Impact – how do we ensure follow-through and momentum
- Fatigue – will co-creators keep it up when the novelty has gone
- Keep it real – how do we avoid the technocratic urge?
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Thomas Sutton, Relinquishing Control: creating space for open innovation
Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.
- What is innovation?
- Open delivery
- Open experiences
- Open design
- Putting it back together.
What is innovation?
Process of moving from one situation to another situation. A situation is a network of people and things, animated by flows of information, energy, material and behaviour. Innovation is the process by which new things are added to the situation that modifies both the structure of the network and its flows.
Open delivery
The best system is not necessarily the one that wins, often, it is the most open. Look at Apple OS vs Android.
Open experiences
Customers can – and do – choose their own route through a process.
Open design
- A user-guided design process. How can we let users guide our design?
- Immersive research recognises that objectivity is futile.
- You can use open and playful participatory design to create dialogue with users.
- Let users build their own paths.
Putting it back together.
Open innovation is about guiding but not constraining users through a process.
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