5. November 2009 by Aidan.

I attended the “Designed in Ireland” event in Waterford last night, as part of 2009 Design Week. The event was very well organised by Marcus Notley and his team and was held in the City Library. In addition to poster presentations of the work of many designers in the South East, there were two talks from Sean McNulty of Innovator and Siobhan O’Dwyer of Threesixty.

Sean, MD of Innovator, spoke about the different business landscape in Ireland at the moment and the need for everyone to take their destiny into their own hands and re-evaluate their business model in order to survive and prosper. He argued for the application of Design Thinking to all of our businesses and introduced many of the tools that can be used to implement this. This would be very much in line with what I have been saying for some time also (see Service Design & Innovation Ireland Linkedin Group) and I would be in complete agreement with Sean.

Siobhan, Brand Director of Threesixty, spoke about the future of design and consumer patterns. We have been forced out of our rampant consumption culture by the need to cut back on spending, but even if the money does start to return to our pockets, will we return to the consumption patterns of before. Siobhan believes that we will be much more discerning about our purchases and that we will tend towards purchasing fewer, better designed products. I tend to agree that our buying patterns will be altered significantly. She also spoke about the future of eco and green products and services. Siobhan wrapped up by introducing us to the term “nonsumers” as the future consumers, her term for people who have turned their back on mass disposable consumption. It was a great talk with a lot to think about.

During the evening I also had a long chat with the wonderful Denise Ryan of Fineline Interiors. Denise has worked on some major commercial design projects and in a lesson to all service providers has now expanded her offerings by teaming up with Tony Clayton-Lea to provide bespoke music designed to complement the design and ambiance of your premises. Great example of extending your service offerings.

Overall it was a very enjoyable evening and a great success.  

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4. November 2009 by Aidan.

I attended a breakfast briefing this morning at the Smurfit Business School at UCD, Dublin. The briefing was to introduce a new Executive Education Programme that the school will offer from the end of this month.

The class is titled “Innovate in the Services Sector - Strategy & Skills” and covers the following areas :

• An understanding of what Service Innovation looks like and how methods have been developed to treat it differently than product innovation, along with frameworks to explore opportunities and make your vision a reality.
• An overview of best practice, an understanding of methods and models that work, so you can confidently set an innovation course. If you’re ready we can take the first steps together.
• An innovation-teaming experience where you’ll design or improve a service or “servitise” a product company. This will give you the intuitive grasp of what your teams need, how they’ll function as innovators themselves.

This mornings briefing gave a broad overview of the class and was presented by Keith Finglas and Chris Kurjan from Innovation Delivery. There was a broad mix of people at the briefing and I was surprised by the number from the financial services sector. There was some active discussion and it was good to see the level of interest in this emerging area.  

Here is a link to the details of the class: Innovate in the Services Sector

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24. September 2009 by Aidan.

I have set up a “Service Design & Innovation - Ireland” group on Linkedin.

Here is the overview from the Linkedin page:

There is a growing international reliance on design in the race to develop radically new, innovative, service offerings.
The demands for Service Innovation are highlighting the need for the practical application of Service Design and Product Servitization techniques.
Ireland is well positioned to play a leading role in the world in these areas however there is no cohesive approach being taken in Ireland to ensure that the experts in these fields are working together towards a common goal.
This group offers practitioners and other interested parties the opportunity to connect and start the discussion about how to move this forward and tap into the opportunities that exist today.

I am looking forward to having interested people join this forum with a view to improving Ireland’s overall standing in the areas of service design and innovation, before it’s too late!

Here is a link to the group page. 

Aidan

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21. August 2009 by Aidan.

Despite the fact that services are the main contributor to the Irish economy, the field of service design in Ireland is particularly under developed. There are a few companies practicing in this area but there is certainly room for major improvement in the profile of this sector.

If you are involved in Service Design in Ireland then let me know as I would like to build a network of companies working is this area with a view to raising the profile within Ireland and highlighting the capabilities and experience that exists here to a wider audience.  

Aidan

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21. August 2009 by Aidan.

In a previous blog I suggested that Service Design could become the next Health & Safety. The point I was trying to make is that you need processes, and ultimately a culture, to harness the creativity and innovation within a business in order to be able to implement innovative services. It’s not innovation if you just had an idea, it only really counts if you implemented changes based on that idea.

I came across an interesting article from Business Week magazine from October 2008 in which Mark Jones and Fran Salamionis state that strategies at the frontier of service design need a blend of creativity and discipline. They offer a good 5 step framework for implementing innovation projects successfully.

One key point they make is that innovation is not just a matter of “aha” moments, it needs a process that takes a disciplined approach to identify and execute the most promising ideas.

The article also links to some great work that Ideo did with 1st Source Bank in Indiana. Here is a link directly to the case study.

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2. April 2009 by Aidan.

In order to design good services (or products) you need to ensure that the structure of your organisation does not get in the way. In most firms there are different departments with specific roles and responsibilities, e.g. Marketing, Design, Engineering, Sales, etc… 

This creates silos within the company and each department may have different objectives and success (& reward) criteria. All of this can get in the way of designing the best product or service.

Successful companies can break down these organisational barriers to really deliver high quality customer focussed offerings and the best way to achieve this is the use of cross-functional teams working together on a single project.

Peter Merholz talks about this in his recent Harvard Business Blog.   

Aidan

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13. February 2008 by Aidan.

There are many reasons why companies engage consultants to work with them. The primary reason being that the consultants bring some expertise or experience to the company that is not available in-house. This is most successful when there is a specific technical need for the consultant to support a project, e.g. an IT consultant to support the introduction of a new CRM or business intelligence system. With the right preparation in place and clearly defined objectives this can be a very successful relationship.

However, many companies engage consultants to develop some initiative that does not exist, or is not working, in the company today. For example, getting a consultant to come in to design a new Performance Management system or to drive an improvement initiative. These are often areas to which the management has not assigned any priority in the past and is now trying to fix quickly with the help of the external consultant. In that environment it is also common for these initiatives to become lower priority again after the consultant has left. The result is a failed implementation of a worthwhile initiative and a general feeling of scepticism among employees about what the management priorities are. In fact the situation is often worse after the project has failed than if it were never started in the first place.  

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