The financial crunch in the past decade has caused many disruptions in consumer markets. Globally, products are transforming into commodities, experiences are prioritized over products, and people are turning to shared economy to exploit less utilized assets, and create new sources of revenue. Through building a culture of innovation, companies like UBER and AIRBNB were able to take great advantage of those disruptions to rise in a formidable economic climate.

Companies now understand the potential of investing in innovation, but many executives fear its price tag. Research by McKinsey & Co. revealed 94 percent of surveyed executives were unhappy with their company’s innovative performance. However, investing in innovation strategies can be daunting if the company does not have the right culture. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” – a phrase originated by Peter Drucker, forms an absolute reality in today’s business world! Any company disconnecting the two are risking their progress and success. In fact, the cost of innovation does not have to be high, if you build the right culture. Although there is no silver bullet to building a culture of innovation, here are some advice that work across industries.

BELIEVE IN EVERYONE’S CREATIVE ABILITIES

We are all born creative; with a natural ability to come up with original ideas, and the courage to try them out. However, society and formal education let doubt get between us and our creative capacity. To put it differently, people seem to have lost their creative confidence. Thus, in the search for innovation, leaders must help their teams rebuild their confidence, and give everyone a safe space to take creative risks, without fear of rejection or ridicule. Restoring their creative confidence is one of the biggest investments a leader could make in a disruptive economy.

EMBRACE AMBIGUITY

Fear of ambiguity is one of the strongest barriers to innovation. With this in mind, we must learn to embrace ambiguity, and give ourselves the permission to explore untraveled territories. We must approach the unknown with a design mentality of human-centered discovery. Seek breadth to understand context, seek depth to thoroughly understand users, and seek nontraditional sources to unearth hidden insights that will serve as the basis for innovation.

BUILD DIVERSE, TRANSDISCIPLINARY TEAMS

Many people believe that creativity is a spur of the moment enlightenment, a sudden inspiration, or a lucky coincidence. However, the fact of the matter is that creativity is an inspiration process, which blooms by cross-pollination between multiple domains. How would a sociologist, a teacher, an engineer, a biologist, a behavioral scientist, an economist or an artist tackle a business innovation challenge in your industry? For instance, the engineer might focus on the technology, the behavioral scientist might focus on the user experience, the sociologist might focus on the community dynamics, the economist might focus on the financial viability. Now, imagine the outcome when we bring them together on the same team, under the right culture! It is not about thinking outside the box, it’s about expanding our box. Creativity favors the connected mind!

START EVERY ENGAGEMENT WITH A FRESH EYE

Many business decisions are taken on gut feelings. In fact, over-reliance on intuition puts too much faith in unconscious processing of information in our brain, without the ability to express reason. Every context is different; every user group is different. Learnings uncovered in field research are oftentimes unique to the user group and their environment, and do not necessarily follow our intuitive judgement and predictions. With this in mind, we must adopt a process of conscious discovery; start every engagement with a fresh eye, uncluttered by norms, personal judgement and past experiences. Insights are often unanticipated; do not let your past experience blur your future judgement.

EXPERIMENTATION IS YOUR CATALYST FOR SUCCESS

People tend to be their own worst critics; they self-censor, killing potentially innovative ideas because of their fear of failure. Thus, we must help teams get over their fears, and develop a more courageous attitude towards experimentation. Cross the thinking-doing gap early on in the problem solving process by slicing challenges into smaller parts, and designing quick prototypes for insightful feedback that guides the iterative design process. Some iterations are destined to fail, embrace this fact! It is better to fail early when the stakes are low. Learn from those failures to make your idea stronger with every iteration.

HIRE FOR ATTITUDE, TRAIN FOR SKILL

Building the right team helps you build the right culture. A rule of thumb, it is easier to train for skills than train for attitude. Scout people who have a growth mindset – with a desire to learn and a belief that abilities can be acquired. A sense of self efficacy – having confidence in their own ability to triumph above all obstacles. An abundance mentality – they think big, and are always happy to share knowledge and collaborate. Flexible – are able to look at problems from different perspectives. Non-conforming – are curious and do not follow conventions. Risk taking, and are not afraid of being wrong.

Creating a culture ripe for innovation is critical to an organization’s competitive positioning and growth. Most companies understand the value of innovation, but fall short when it comes to execution. Cultures do not create themselves, and undoubtedly are not achieved by simply adopting creativity tools and artifacts. Innovation starts with a mindset; going outside of your comfort zone, embracing ambiguity, making the familiar strange, fostering connectedness, and having faith in your team’s abilities.

Get in touch and let us start the conversation on how ERGO can help you build a culture of innovation.

Business Design, Design Thinking, Innovation Design

DESIGN: FROM THE DRAFTING TABLE TO THE BOARDROOM

By Fady Michel on

April 21, 2018

- Business Design, Design Thinking, Innovation Design

To many, design is often seen as a cost, a visual accessory that adds beauty to a product after it is engineered, a graphical output, or something that creative bohemians in marketing do between their breaks. But, in today’s business world, design has moved from the drafting table to the boardroom. Design has become a mindset; a framework for innovation, driven by the desire to deeply understand user needs, map their behavior, and crack the motivations and deep emotions driving their actions or inactions.

DESIGN-DRIVEN COMPANIES

Design-led companies such as Apple, Coca-Cola, IBM, Nike and Procter & Gamble have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 10 years by an extraordinary 219%, according to a 2014 assessment by the Design Management Institute. At the core of each of these successful design stories is a state of customer intimacy, a deep understanding of users’ or customers’ unarticulated needs. Because of the remarkable success of design-led companies, design has evolved beyond aesthetics, and moved from the drafting table to the boardroom. More and more organizations nowadays want to learn how to think like designers to solve their most complex problems and drive innovation.

DESIGN VS. MARKET RESEARCH

Design research techniques can go much deeper than historical data and market research, which are only capable of scratching the surface. By designing human-centered empathy, observation and immersion research, we are able to identify not just what people do, but how and why they do it. Every action that people engage in has a deeper social or emotional meaning to them, even though they often lack the tools to articulate those connections. Equipped with empathy, ideation, experimentation and prototyping skills, designers embrace this ambiguity and navigate the unknown towards clarity.

DESIGN AS A MINDSET

We need to bring design much closer to the center of our planning and strategy development. Start applying design principles, not just to shape and form, but also to functionality, customer relations, customer experiences, business modeling and in-house operations. We must restore customer centricity, and think, how can we make people’s functional, social and/or emotional jobs easier? Wether an organization is looking to improve sales, strengthen customer loyalty, change user behavior, create a new product or service, open up new markets, or even create new venture, customer centricity minimizes the risk and uncertainty of innovation, and holds a secret recipe for success.

By placing the end user at the center of the design canvas, we combine right-brain creative thinking with left-brain analytical thinking to help craft and build insight-driven solutions to people’s most vital needs. By unearthing those emotional connections and deep insights, we can design products, services, policies and processes that connect with our end user on a humanistic level, deeper than just functionality, where the competition could be fierce.

To learn more about how ERGO can help you achieve customer-centricity and drive innovation, please get in touch and let us start the conversation.

Design Research, Innovation Design

ERGO DESIGN MODUS – Designing User-Centered Innovation

By Fady Michel on

January 20, 2018

- Design Research, Innovation Design

Design thinking is an innovation mindset; an advocate for human centricity. In a world where most challenges are inherently human, design thinking becomes a survival skill. There are several design thinking frameworks developed by design schools and used by design firms. Although they might look different at first sight, they all follow a similar philosophy of user-centered discovery.

Embracing Ambiguity

One goal all design thinking frameworks share in common is to help designers embrace ambiguity, and explore unfamiliar territories. Through a guided process, the learnings and insights from each phase become the foundation for the next step. At ERGO, we built our design thinking framework to guide us through every engagement, from inception to fulfillment.

Phase 1: Discovery

ERGO follows a process of conscious discovery. We start every engagement with a fresh eye, uncluttered by norms, personal judgement or past experiences. In the discovery phase, we question our prior knowledge, point out our assumptions and identify all missing data nuggets, necessary to untangle the complexity of the challenge.

This phase is designed to help us untangle the complexity of the challenge space. By dissecting the problem, and tackling the challenge from various perspectives, we unearth new dimensions, trends and design opportunities along the way.

Phase 2: Inspiration

In the Inspiration phase, we work closely with customers and end users to deeply understand their hidden needs, daily challenges and surrounding environment, through which they interact and make daily decisions. We use a triangulation of ethnographic observation, stakeholder engagement and contextual immersion to build a deep understanding of our user and their environment. What motivates them? What frustrates them? Who inspires them? How do they prioritize our findings from the previous phase?

We dig deeper for experiences and specific incidents and interactions that can help us unearth valuable insights. At the end of this phase, we synthesize research findings, make new meaning and interpretation of our data, and formulate new understandings of our challenge in light of the newly established insights. This becomes the new foundation for the ideation process.

Building deep empathy and restoring customer centricity is what truly differentiates design thinking from other problem solving methodologies. Transforming your field findings into insights will help you frame new design opportunities that tackle not only the user’s functional needs, but also their social and emotional provocations behind their daily decisions and interactions.

Phase 3: Design

In the Design phase, we start by generating multiple ideas to solve our user’s most pressing needs. The new formulation and insights from the previous phase, now, define the ideation process. Focusing on one need at a time, we employ divergent thinking strategies to generate multiple ways to meet our user’s needs. This lateral thinking strategy ensures the desirability and originality of the generated solutions. We pick the best ideas, according to a predefined selection criteria, and prototype them.

By placing the solutions into the hands of the user, we are able to gather quick feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Which design resonates the most with them? What features do they prioritize? Which idea fits seamlessly into their daily lives? We use the new learnings from our prototype and feedback sessions to iterate on our design until we have a prototype that maximizes value. During this Build-Measure-Learn cycle, we do not only test for desirability, but also feasibility and business viability of suggested solutions. At the end of this agile creation process, we develop a detailed concept and a high fidelity prototype of the most promising solution.

Phase 4: Growth

Once we have a validated prototype, we perform a detailed product/service landscape analysis to design a unique value proposition. A validated value proposition is then embedded into an innovative and sustainable business model that can scale the proposed solution.

In the Growth phase, we leverage our expertise in design research, business design and behavioral design to conceive and deliver a detailed Innovation Blueprint. The blueprint presents a clear master structure for the innovation strategy. It starts with defining the intended outcome for the final solution, and ends with a concrete action plan, highlighting the [1] Scope of Innovation, the [2] People involved and their roles, the [3] Resources needed to create, deliver and capture value, and a detailed [4] Action Plan for implementation and growth.

Design-based problem solving is a highly iterative practice, so always keep the user centered in every step of the process. Let the user, and the information collected in the Inspiration phase guide your choices and decisions along the way. And trust us, if you stick to the process, you will surprise yourself!

Get in touch to learn more on how you can use design thinking to deliver user-centered innovations in your organization.

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Innovation Design

BUILDING A CULTURE OF INNOVATION