Touchpoint Vol. 11 No. 1 - Service Design for Innovation and Start-ups

vol 11 no 1 | july 2019 | 18 €

Service Design for Innovation and Start-ups

28 Making the Case for Service Design for Start-ups and Innovation Jesse Grimes 46 Pu t ting Service Design at the Heart of Corporate Innovation Jana Kukk 64 the AI Design Sprint Jonas Wenke

Touchpoint Volume 11 No. 1 July 2019 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052

Pictures Unless otherwise stated, the copyrights of all images used for illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article

Published by Service Design Network

Printing Hundt Druck

Publisher Birgit Mager

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Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes Guest Editors Amanda Damewood Mike Pinder Diane Shen Project Management Cristine Lanzoni Moira Douranou Art Direction Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber Cover Adobe Stock (napkin) Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber

Service Design Network gGmbH MĂźlheimer Freiheit 56 D-51063 KĂśln Germany www.service-design-network.org Contact & Advertising Sales Moira Douranou journal@service-design-network.org For ordering Touchpoint, please visit www.service-design-network.org

f ro m t h e e d i t o r s

Service Design for Innovation and Start-ups I’d like to welcome you to this issue by attempting a bit of mind-reading. Are you ready?

I’m guessing that you’re a service designer working within an agency. Am I wrong?

Perhaps a service designer in a large corporate? What about a public sector role?

I might not have gotten it right at first, but it’s fair to say that most working service designers these days fall into one of those three groups. I’d never guess you’re working in a start-up, because so few of us are. Yet start-ups represent an exciting challenge for service design - a new frontier, if you will. And that’s the topic of this issue of Touchpoint.

A service designer’s skills and mindset are applicable to many of the challenges faced by start-ups, and even more of them once you add in business design.

We design based on research-driven insights and have a holistic perspective on customer experience. Yet we’re largely an unknown quantity amongst start-ups.

I’ve had success - and faced challenges for sure - in working with start-ups myself, and running a series of courses for them in Asia and Europe, teaching them how to apply our tools and perspectives. Based on those experiences, I’ve written an article in this issue to share my learnings and inspire other service designers to tackle this challenge, and find out what it’s like to work for an organisation whose mission and service offering might radically change from one day to the next. I’d safely bet that’s not something you’re used to!

I’m pleased to have invited Mike Pinder to co-edit this issue, who comes from Board of Innovation. The open way they share their thinking about innovation is a great resource. Taiwan’s Diane Shen - a long-time friend of this publication - also came on board to assist as a Guest Editor.

The start-up scene grows and gets more attention by the day, and there’s a good chance your city hosts a start-up ecosystem you’re unaware of. If you’re looking for a new client opportunity, and willing to stretch your boundaries and learn new techniques and new terminologies (and yes, face some struggles), you might want to explore working with them yourself, either directly or through an accelerator or incubator. Here’s to taking on a new challenge!

Jesse Grimes for the editorial board

Jesse Grimes is Editor-in-Chief of Touchpoint and has eleven years´ experience as a service designer and consultant. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney and is now based in Amsterdam. He is an independent service design practitioner, trainer and coach (kolmiot.com). Jesse is also Senior Vice President of the Service Design Network.

Amanda Damewood is a hu­ man centred design coach and practitioner with a focus on government. You can find out more about her work at www.hcdcoach.com.

Mike Pinder has over ten years hands-on experience across the design, business and innovation fields within Fortune 500s and is currently specialised within innovation consulting.

Based in Antwerp, Belgium, he speaks, authors and facilitates globally on innovation strategy, new business design and talent development programmes.

Diane Shen is a Creative Director who co-manages the Business Models Inc. Taipei office, a global strategy design agency. She works with clients to solve ambiguous business challenges: new business incubation, customer experience re-design and internal cultural change.

Diane is also a co-founder of the SDN Taiwan Chapter.

Birgit Mager, publisher of Touchpoint, is professor for service design at Köln Inter­ national School of Design (KISD) in Cologne, Germany.

She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and President of the Service Design Network.

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31

Building service design competence in the organisation

Accumulating knowledge Internal communication Roadshow presentations E-course

12 feature:

SERVICE DESIGN FOR INNOVATION AND START-UPS

Building attitude

Developing skills

Service design hackathon

Hands-on service design workshops for teams

14 Applying Service Design

While ‘Innovating like a Start-up’ Mike Pinder

20 Validating Start-up Ideas

7 2 imprint 3

from the editors

6 news 8 cross-discipline 8

4

Quantifying the Variability Inherent in Services Taylor Kim, Ben McCammon

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Using Service Prototyping Primož Mahne

24 Service Designing the

Start-up Ecosystem Elmer Zinkhann

28 Making the Case for

Service Design for Startups and Innovation Jesse Grimes

36 Uplifting Service Culture

in Large Organisations Jane Vita, Jocelyn Ng, Andrew Thong

46 40 Understanding People vs.

Getting Things Delivered Weronika Rochacka Gagliardi, Ludmiła Rychter, Adam Kryszkiewicz

46 Putting Service Design

at the Heart of Corporate Innovation Jana Kukk

50 Designing an Innovative

Municipal Organisation Katie Monteith

c ontents

65

56 Tools and Methods 58 Using Service Design

in Start-ups Cathrine Seidelin, Stine Moeslund Sivertsen

87

64 The AI Design Sprint

Jonas Wenke 70 Conscious Design:

A Practitioner’s Mindset Karwai Ng, Will Anderson

82 profiles 82 Luis Alt 86 inside sdn

76 education and research 76 “Create a Home”:

The Impact of Service Design on Start-ups Brittany Merkle, Tucker Witter, Peng Hsuan (Oscar)

86 The First SDN China

National Conference Held in Shanghai

88 Chapter Success

Stories 2018/19

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Calling All Aspiring Case Study Contributors: The Time is Now to Submit!

With all the exciting service design projects our over 15,000-strong SDN members/community followers are actively working on – or have completed in the not-so-distant past – we are excited to introduce a new platform to showcase it to the rest of the community: the new SDN Case Study Library.

The collection, which includes a new look, better structure, new features and new capabilities, has been redesigned to present

An Invitation to Join the SDN Case Study Editorial Team

The SDN is pleased to have launched our new Case Study Library and, in turn, is on the hunt for a handful of dynamic service designers to support us in the shaping of the content we

cases in a more informative and compelling way. With an easy-to-follow template, stepby-step guidelines and the newly-formed SDN Case Study Editorial Team to support your efforts, contributors can expect a seamless experience throughout their submission process.

To help launch the Case Study Library, our Case Study Editorial Team is putting out a call for submissions: Aspiring SDN case study authors, it’s time to start sharing your work! Whether it’s a great project that makes you smile every time you think about it or

house there. As a voluntary editor on our Editorial Team, your job will be to work closely with case study contributors to help them bring their case studies to our worldwide readership. Because we’re committed to building a global team of diverse individuals, we are seeking SDN members

To learn more about this volunteer role, or to apply, please visit the Jobs section at

“that one” that used to keep you up at night – we want to hear from you.

Visit your SDN dashboard, click on “My Contributions” followed by “Submit a Case Study” to start the process of becoming a published contributor today!

who are either professional consultants, working within the public/private sectors or have roots in academia, to support us with this on-going project.

The role of a case study editor allows you to capture first-hand insights into the global activities of your fellow practitioners, stay up-to-date on the latest trends shaping our industry, and position yourself as a thought leader amongst our over 15,000 members/commu­ nity followers and beyond!

network.org or reach out to us at casestudy@ service-design-network.org.

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Credits: shutterstock

www.service-design-

ne ws

Thank You for an Amazing Service Design Day!

Service Design Day 2019 was the biggest yet! It was excellent to see the service design community come together. Each year, June 1st is all about celebrating the power and spirit of service design, as well as connecting our astonishing community.

This year, we had 34 inter­ national activities happening globally, in more than 20 countries and across five continents.

Our theme for this year’s edition was "Do good – give back!”, and it was all about giving back to the community. Chapters, organisations and individual enthusiasts from all around the world held events surrounding the theme. Doing good was interpreted in many different ways by our members, from organising workshops for charities, having events for children or the elderly, having meet-ups, workshops, online campaigns

On July 1, 2019, the SDN Leadership Team joined the

and even picnics. All-in-all, our community had many lively discussion on how we can give back!

Our chapters held events to raise awareness, educate and celebrate service design. Overall, there were more than 750 people that attended chapter events worldwide.

A big thank you to our chapter representatives for dedicating their time to help grow and connect the

service design communities; we couldn't have done it without you.

Finally, thank you to everyone who participated in Service Design Day and made it so special.

It was great celebrating with you, and we look forward to many years to come. Your creativity and passion for service design continue to inspire us. Not only were we delightfully overwhelmed by your social media posts, we were also blown away with your activities and initiatives to use your service design skills for good! Stay tuned for SDDay 2020.

HQ team for a strategy meeting and to celebrate Service Design Day together

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Quantifying the Variability Inherent in Services How firms can marry service design and Six Sigma methodologies What makes services so challenging to redesign? In a word: variability. There are often dozens of variables that change each time a customer experiences a service, making each experience a chance for things to go wrong!

Taylor Kim is a service designer at Mackenzie Investments.

Trained in both Lean Six Sigma and service design methodologies, she has used both to create value for clients in the financial services and healthcare industries.

Taylor has an MBA from the University of Toronto.

Ben McCammon is Director of Service Innovation at Mackenzie Investments.

Previously, he has grown and led multi-disciplinary teams at consultancies Happen and Bridgeable. Ben has a MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, and recently completed Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training.

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For those designing services within large, hierarchical organisations, numbers and KPIs are essential criteria used to select opportunities, identify interventions and secure investments needed to bring designs to life.

How can service design teams deal with this variability whilst quantifying it? To tackle this challenge, our Service Innovation team at Mackenzie Investments has been combining service design with a proven, complementary methodology: Six Sigma. In this article, we discuss why Six Sigma is a powerful complement to service design at key project stages and phases. Insights are based upon our own practice, as well as interviews with four service design practitioners who have experience in applying both methodologies. We offer advice for service designers wishing to learn more, and share how service design can help mitigate key limitations of Six Sigma.

What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a methodology and set of tools for identifying and designingout variability or inconsistency in order to improve the quality of a process or experience in measurable ways1 . It is sometimes referred to as ‘Continuous Improvement’ or ‘Process Engineering’ and is often combined with other Lean methodologies.

Six Sigma methods are mostly used for incremental innovation and for optimising existing processes.

Originating in manufacturing during the 1980s, over the past 20 years it has also been applied to services. Ben Kim, Manager of Service Design and Strategy at TELUS, sees similarities between the two methodologies. In his words, “Like service design, Six Sigma emphasises diverging before

1 What is Six Sigma? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.isixsigma.com/new-to-six-sigma/ what-six-sigma/

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converging, making the ‘invisible visible’ through visual mapping and cross-functional collaboration”2 .

Why should service designers leverage Six Sigma?

Using Six Sigma tools in service design projects can yield many benefits, as outlined in Figure 1. Here we will elaborate on two main areas of benefit. Firstly, using Six Sigma can bring more rigour to problemfinding because it uses tools to quantify the current state of services, and providing quantitative data can create urgency in addressing problems. Secondly, Six Sigma tools illuminate the tactical details that are necessary for adapting an ideal service experience concept into something that can be implemented.

Quantifying variability in the current state When trying to secure approval for a project, Six Sigma can help quantify the level of pain caused by a problem and articulate why it would be worth investing the resources needed for a service design approach.

Andrea Chan, Director of Service Design at CIBC, finds that Six Sigma is great at quantifying variables, such as a ‘delay in a service’ into a ‘dollar cost’, that senior leaders will care about3 (see Fig. 1 for more details).

While quantitative methods are not unique to Six Sigma, Chan finds that Six Sigma tools are helpful because they are intuitive and easy for service designers to pick-up. There are two main benefits to using Six Sigma tools to quantify the cost of poor quality.

First, urgency is created, inducing stakeholders to act, thus increasing the likelihood that the service design project will be funded. Second, having a quantifiable value allows stakeholders to easily align on the defini­ tion of success for the project.

Furthermore, during the discovery phase, Six Sigma tools can be used to understand the existing variability of current services without resorting to more uncertain averages or ‘ballpark’ estimates. In our experience,

2 Kim, B. (2019, April 9). Personal Interview 3 Chan, A. (2019, April 10). Personal Interview

we have noticed that many large organisations routinely attempt to quantify services using averages or ‘guestimates’. For example, average handle time in call centres or average time to complete an order.

Jon Dhama, AVP of Innovation at IGM Financial, provided an example from a past project in which averages hid critical variations which had a big impact on customer experience. The team looked at back-office processing times of a financial services company that appeared ‘okay’ as an average (about one business day). But when Six Sigma tools were applied on the variation of processing times, a huge variability was discovered – from a few hours to a few days.

Furthermore, they discovered some customers were routinely experiencing both extremes. Some customers never knew if requests would be handled in a few hours or days! Without applying Six Sigma tools, the team would have missed vital insights about the current state. This also helped focus subsequent qualitative research on the right problem areas to understand exactly why the variability in timing was occurring.

Dealing with variability of future states Service design has many methods for designing future states (or improved service experiences) and there are two specific gaps that Six Sigma can help fill. In an attempt to avoid being constrained by current realities, future-state designs are often overly-optimistic and usually do not include a plan for when things go wrong (another form of variability). The risk is that teams tasked with implementation may simply go along with creating a rosy future state, while ultimately not supporting it.

Suhaib Ahmed, Manager of Business Process Analysis at Loblaw Companies Limited, emphasises the value of Six Sigma tools such as ‘Failure Mode and Effects Analysis’ (FMEA) (see Fig. 1) that help in systematically thinking through what could go wrong, and supports the creation of mitigating strategies. In his experience, coupling a service blueprint with a FMEA is helpful because stakeholders unearth the details necessary to deal with the variability of what could go wrong when trying to make the future state a reality.

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Project stage

Common challenge for service design

LSS method to try

Benefit of LSS method

Scoping and approval

Getting executive approval for resource-heavy service design approaches, in a way that links to business metrics

Cost of Poor Quality (CoPQ)

—— CoPQ quantifies a problem in terms of hard costs, often dollars —— Amount can be used to justify extra time and resources needed for service design projects

Understanding the current state

Supporting qualitative insights with concrete quantitative data

Value Stream Map

—— A visual represents metrics such as wait/queue times, and numbers of defects/ errors, at each stage in an experience; helps to size opportunities

Hypothesis Testing

—— Using statistical analysis to prove which inputs/ variables have the most significant impact on the variability of outcomes

Design the future state

Giving implementation teams actionable direction, that includes guidance on what might go wrong

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

—— A structured framework for identifying ways a process could fail at each stage, and potential fixes/mitigations —— Can be combined with existing service design tools such as journey maps or blueprints to help implementation teams fix problems faster

Implementation

Being able to quantify improvements more quickly, to justify further investment or further changes

Design of Experiment (DOE)

—— Ability to test multiple variables in one experiment, and determine which have a statistically significant impact (results cannot be explained away as random chance) —— Allows for more confident investment in scaling up

Fig. 1: Lean Six Sigma tools applied to service design challenges

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The FMEA method facilitates stakeholders in building confidence in the future state by creating an avenue for voicing concerns and co-creating risk mitigation strategies. The ultimate benefit to the organisation is that this increases the likelihood of teams committing to implementation.

Finally, when a service intervention (whether a test or a pilot) needs to be quantified, it is often hard for service design teams to ‘prove’ interventions will consistently lead to improvements in key metrics over the long term. This is where service design projects can draw on Six Sigma tools such as the ‘Design of Experiment’ (DOE) method (see Fig. 1).

One of our interviewees shared a story of a call centre service redesign in which the team introduced behavioural interventions during the two-month pilot phase. The interventions resulted in a 7 percent increase in the number of inquiries that were resolved in a single call, which was a key objective. The DOE method proved that a difference between before and after interventions was statistically significant (meaning that it could not have occurred simply due to random variation), and initial results gave leadership the confidence to scale the pilot project to the rest of the call centre. After scaling, there was a 23 percent increase in ‘first call resolution’ metrics compared to the previous year, marking the highest performance since the organisation began tracking it.

How can service designers integrate Six Sigma methods into practice?

Six Sigma is relatively easy-to-learn, and allows service designers to add practical analytical tools without needing a PhD in statistics or data science.

— Small step: Read the book Value Stream Mapping by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling4 . It explains how visual mapping tools allow for quantification of variability in services.

Main limitations of Six Sigma

Why service design is a good complement

Ideation – Can be overly focused on obvious fixes or linear logic

Has many structured frameworks for more creative ideation and more lateral thinking

Voice of the Customer – Often uses proxy data, or traditional methods such as surveys or focus groups (limited to stated needs)

Has more robust methods for uncovering latent user needs, and for involving customers directly in generative research, co-creation or validation of early concepts

Fig. 2: How service design can complement Six Sigma’s limitations

Medium step: Find a Six Sigma or Continuous — Improvement practitioner in your company (or in your professional network) who can give you informal mentoring on Six Sigma tools.

Big step: Complete Lean Six Sigma ‘Yellow Belt’ — training. A robust Yellow Belt course includes three to five full days of dedicated training which gives you in-depth understandings of key concepts.

Six Sigma methods are useful at quantifying variability when securing project approval, quantifying opportunities, translating the aspirational future state to more helpful guidelines, and q ­ uantifying the benefits of service interventions. Leaders we interviewed are pioneering ways of combining the two methodologies in large organisations and we hope these examples inspire you to further explore applications of Six Sigma in your own practice.

4 https://www.goodreads.com/book/ show/17718225-value-stream-mapping

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f e at u re

ig n S er v i c e D es on for Innovati ps an d S t a r t - u

Applying Service Design While ‘Innovating like a Start-up’ The role of service design in global Fortune 500 project teams How do corporate innovation teams de-risk projects across the innovation process in relation to service design? How does service design address high-level early stage uncertainty for corporate start-up teams? Does service design function as an effective stand-alone discipline for corporate start-ups?

Mike Pinder is a Senior Innovation Consultant at Board of Innovation, helping global Fortune 500 organisations to innovate like start-ups, from innovation strategy to Design Thinking, Lean Startup and business model innovation to create intrapreneurial troublemakers. He has more than ten years’ experience guiding executives and project teams across industries, in B2B and B2C settings, for clients such as GE, AB InBev, ZF, Logitech, ING and Bpost. mike.pinder@ boardofinnovation.com

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What follows are some of Board of Innovation’s key insights formed whilst guiding intrapreneurial teams across the innovation process within global Fortune 500 organisations.

Hot pursuit of knowing Service design is a key discipline within a plethora of approaches that can be deployed as and where needed to accelerate ‘knowing’ in support of ‘what to do’ while managing risk and uncertainty to create customer-valued outcomes. We have seen an evolution, a convergence and consolidation of approaches and disciplines across the start-up and corporate worlds. There is a head-to-head race to secure resources on both sides in creating processes and values to best support all innovation types, from incremental to adjacent to radical new ventures.

Large corporates and start-ups alike are tasked with bringing new value to people as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

In order to achieve this, there are a vast array of theories, tools, methodologies

and frameworks to support creating an under­standing of possible approaches, to de-risk the innovation process, and to help know what is knowable, ultimately ensuring both value delivery and economic impact. The ultimate aim however, is to maximise the likelihood or chances of generating the right kind of value for people trying to get things done.

To the newcomer, it can be daunting to understand and know what to apply at the correct phase of a project’s lifecycle.

This article aims to look beyond service design as a discipline and uncover more broadly how it can be applied across the entire innovation process. This in turn gives a wider picture of where service design is currently deployed as a complimentary capability with other de-risking approaches and methodologies

s e r v i c e d e s i g n f o r i n n o vat i o n a n d s ta r t - u p s

from within the large corporates setting. We will build up a visual picture of how the innovation process is typically structured, the logic behind it and where service design plays its part in the wider picture.

Methodologies gaining C-level momentum Although Design Thinking has origins dating back to the 1960s, it has only in more recent years been under­ stood as a vital strategic bridge between customers and business outcomes at the executive level. As a boutique agency, we’ve seen ever-increasing demand – particularly for Design Thinking and business modelling capabilities – from a variety of sources over the past ten years, at client organisations such as Orange, ING, GE, Roche, ABInBev, Philips, P&G and many others.

Service design in this context, although mature as a discipline, remains poorly understood as a methodology at the executive level, let alone considered an independently essential strategic capability to invest in.

Design Thinking, Lean Startup and business modelling are hot topics (although the underlying logic is not new) amongst Fortune 500 senior executives who are tasked with generating sustained long-term shareholder growth in the double digits. Due to unprecedented levels of organisational disruption, astute CEOs, CIOs, HR managers and R&D leaders are heavily investing in balanced portfolio approaches to strategic innovation that structurally and systematically enable incremental, adjacent and disruptive innovation capabilities on demand.

Design Thinking, Lean Startup and business model innovation have become very well-known methodologies due to best-selling literature from the likes of Tim Brown, Eric Ries and Alex Osterwalder.

Consequently, they have gained much greater visibility at senior leadership strategic levels, and more resources are deployed to develop capabilities and long-term culture in those areas specifically.

However, because service design has multiple methodological cross-over points with Design Thinking and Lean Startup, and is less understood at the executive level, it has yet to garner its own mandate as a strategicallycritical standalone capability to invest in. What this means

2 Viability

Innovation

(Business)

1 Desirability

3 Feasibility

(Human)

(Technical)

Fig. 1: Key stages of the innovation process

for service design as a field is that it has yet to gain the individual attention it needs and rarely gets specifically referred to within the Fortune 500s we work with.

The innovation process and service design To understand what role service design plays within the corporate context, we need to get an understanding of what makes it innovative, and how it is typically dissected and made manageable by working project teams. For the sake of clarity and simplicity, we define innovation as: ‘the commercialisation of the idea’. A creative idea, concept or solution is not an innovation until it has a viable and profitable business model to support it, and vice versa.

Innovation spans three key areas (see Fig. 1): Customer desirability – Does it solve needs and problems?

Economic viability – Can it scale profitably?

Technical feasibility – Can it be delivered reliably?

It is important for intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs to understand that there is no point in trying to build something – and certainly no point in predicting the business case in an Excel sheet – if a customer does not want what you are offering in the first place, because it does not solve a significant pain, problem or need to begin with.

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The innovation funnel A typical innovation funnel is split into key phases to break-down ‘knowing what is knowable’ into manageable chunks for project teams (see Fig. 2 on page 18) This comprises the backbone of a ‘highly-adaptive learning system’ to enable knowing.

1. Discovery – Explore and research potential oppor­

tu­nities from the customer or user point of view to formulate an initial project vision and assess strategic fit.

2. Problem Fit – Frame research insights and use

creative thinking and ideation techniques to build divergent mock-ups or prototypes in order to validate your riskiest critical customer assumptions based on customer needs and problems.

3. Solution Fit – Test your solutions to ensure

they actually solve your customers’ needs and problems whilst maturing a prototype business model to support the viability of your concept.

to guide their decision making and resource allocation choices within limited timeframe and budgets.

Which approach they choose is very closely linked to the phase in which they are currently in. In more mature organisations, internally developed playbooks and toolkits provide formalised guidance because they have resources to invest, while online resources tend provide methodologies for early start-ups who have few resources at their disposal.

Building upon the innovation funnel phases, we can start to see where individual disciplines make most sense in the application of enabling ‘knowing’ and managing risk and uncertainty as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Research versus assumptions Throughout the innovation funnel, teams move back and forth between research and assumption validation.

Qualitative research enables deep insights to be uncovered, while assumption testing validates hypotheses before deploying significant resources to ship solutions.

Types of unknowns: 4. Market Fit – Evaluating and testing your business

model’s critical assumptions with relevant stake­ holders to ensure you can capture value profitably.

1. Unknown unknowns:

Things we don’t know we don’t know 2. Known unknowns:

5. Scaling – Launching your first minimal viable

product (MVP) whilst identifying additional customers and markets to enter into as you scale the venture in the corporate machine.

things that we know we don’t know 3. Known knowns:

Things that we know that we know 4. Unknown knowns:

Things others know that we are unaware of yet

Managing the fuzziness Generally speaking, the level of knowing what can be ‘knowable’ is low at the beginning phases. Later on, knowing emerges through iterative experimentation and validation cycles, which are often termed the infamous ‘fuzzy front end’ of innovation (see Fig. 3 on page 18).

In order to move across the innovation funnel successfully, start-ups and corporate teams need to use tools, methodologies and frameworks to systematically and repeatedly generate new knowledge 16 Touchpoint 11-1

As the level of knowing is most unknown during the problem fit phase, exploratory qualitative research is typically deployed under the guise of Design Thinking and service design methods. This allows one to get to the elusive why’s, or ‘unknown unknowns’ (as well as ‘unknown knowns’) that in turn drive key insights to frame “How might we..?” statements to ideate and propose potential solutions or concepts from.

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As potential solutions (in the form of mock-ups, prototypes and MVPs) begin to emerge during the third phase, qualitative research is used to validate or invalidate underlying critical assumptions related to new features via iterative experimentation and testing cycles. This is where lean start-up and service design validation approaches come into play. A mixture of approaches makes sense because they address new ‘unknown unknowns’ and further ‘why’ questions, whilst also validating ‘known unknowns’ with solution prototype feature assumptions.

Once customer desirability is established through validated learning (demonstrating what you know and how you know it) and cross-checked quantitatively at scale in a sandbox environment, the business can enter the fourth phase – Market Fit – and begin evaluating business model viability. Business and revenue models can now be prototyped full of critical assumptions to be tested and validated as ‘known unknowns’ with all stakeholders involved, before deploying resources to build expensive technical proof-of-concepts using agile development or equivalent methodologies. Further business model assumption (in)validation and pivoting carries-on in tandem, whilst service blueprints and agile team provisioning takes place to fully mature and implement the now mostly ‘known knowns’.

The corporate scale-up engine in phase five can then do what it does best by taking-on the fully-nurtured venture across markets efficiently and optimally, whilst dealing with the final ‘unknown knowns’. It is in this context of managing unknowns, risk and extreme uncertainty across the entire innovation process in large corporates, that service design often gets blurred within and across other more familiar disciplines.

Now that service design has been firmly linked to the wider innovation approach, how does it function as a standalone discipline in relation to other methods in practice within large corporate project teams?

Stratified usage of tools and methods In the corporate innovation setting, many service design tools and methods are used under the Design

Because service design has multiple meth­odological cross­over points with Design Thinking and Lean Startup, and is less understood at the executive level, it has yet to garner its own mandate as a strategically­critical standalone capability to invest in.

Thinking/Lean Startup umbrella. Budding corpo­ rate intrapreneurs are usually working with paper templates and Post-its for the first time, and it would likely add further confusion to separately distinguish service design tools as a subset of Design Thinking and Lean Startup and business modelling. Indeed, for the sake of keeping it simple, we don’t even refer to service design as a standalone discipline, but simply mix and match service design tools across the innovation process where necessary.

The authors of This Is Service Design Doing also reflect this structure by grouping service design methods into distinct categories: basic tools, research, ideation, prototyping and implementation, which map closely with the innovation funnel outlined here. However, taken as individual stages of ‘service design as a discipline’, they do not sufficiently overlap and bridge the entire innovation process, especially with respect to business model innovation.

This leads to a duplication of terminology, tools and methods in the Discovery, Problem Fit and Solution Fit phases, which adds further confusion for project teams.

If there is one place in the innovation funnel where service design as a named discipline adds most value it would be the phase before pre-agile implementation, where new products and services have already been tested, learned from, and pivoted enough in order for pre-production go/no-go decisions to be made (see Fig. 5). Furthermore, Touchpoint 11-1

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Discovery

Problem fit

Solution fit

Market fit

Scaling

Fig. 2: Innovation funnel phases

Fig. 3: The ‘fuzzy front end’ of innovation (in relation to Fig. 2: Innovation funnel phases)

Research

Assumptions

Research

Assumptions

Unknown unknowns

Known unknowns

Unknown unknowns

Known unknowns

Customer desirability

Business model viability

Technical feasiblilty

Fig. 4: Research types and unknown types (in relation to Fig. 2: Innovation funnel phases)

Build Empathise

Assumptions

Business model kit Concept Testing at scale

Define Learn

Assumptions

Test

Features

Monetisation options

Retrospective

Sprint

Ideate Quantitative validation Measure

Build Empathise

Ballpark figures

Assumptions Ideate

Prototype Measure

Review

Assumptions

Business model kit Concept

Prototyping

Ideation

Research

Test

Business model canvas

Testing at scale Define

Learn

Prototype / mvp

Features

Retrospective

Quantitative validation

Prototype / mvp

Business model canvas

Implementation

Prototype

Ballpark figures

Monetisation options

Review

Design thinking Lean start-up Design sprints Protoype sandbox Business model innovation

= Service Design

Agile development

Fig. 5: Innovation funnel with cornerstone methodologies indicating where service design is most used

Sprint

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‘unknowns’ have become predominantly ‘knowns’ due to projects being validated enough to make confident implementation decisions around market fit by deploying appropriate people, time and resources. With emphasis in mind at this stage, the techniques and mind-set of service design are also relevant and applicable to preceding phases of the funnel, even if not explicitly named as such.

Implications for service design So, what does all this mean for service design practi­t ioners working in large corporates? Firstly, you should keep a holistic overview and understanding of the entire innovation process in terms of a process of seeking ‘to know’, rather than seeking to add value as a disconnected modular component of the wider innovation process.

Secondly, being aware of how you need to inter­ face with other methodologies, disciplines and team member profiles is essential, because you will be able to broadly and objectively assess what is ‘known’ or ‘unknown’ to help de-risk projects, thereby increasing the likelihood of positive business impact.

Thirdly, you will add considerable value to organisations if you can speak the same language and seamlessly bridge teams and phases where service design is not typically applied, such as for teams emerging from Lean Startup experimentation mode or from those completing their go-to-market business model validation phase. This is because you are continuing to enable the speed of the process whilst spanning phases.

Lastly, although service design may be embedded within some large corporates as an independent capability already, in our experience with Fortune 500s, it is mostly only evident during problem exploration, prototyping and pre-agile implementation with mature MVPs. With this in mind, when pitching your services to senior leadership or project teams, try not to be too precious about labels and names attributed to methodologies and disciplines, but instead, focus on bridging the service design gaps highlighted across the innovation process (see Fig. 5) so you operate as a cross-domain enabler of ‘know-

ing’. At the end of the day it is about adding value and contributing to the speeding up of ‘knowing’, wherever needed across the entire innovation process.

References • Brown, T. (2009). Chage By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation Harper Business.

• Osterwalder, A. (2019). "The Business Model Canvas." Retrieved 1st June, 2019, from https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/businessmodel-canvas.

• Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Business, Penguin UK. • Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations. New York, The Free Press.

• Rumsfeld, D. (2011). Known and Unkown A Memoir, Penguin Group.

• Stickdorn, M., et al. (2018). This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World, O'Reilly Media.

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Validating Start-up Ideas Using Service Prototyping What if, instead of fads, buzzwords, and perfect pitches, ­start-ups and angel investors based their decisions on real business model validation? No matter how polished the presentation, it’s no match for proving the product can be sold to real, paying customers.

Primož Mahne is Design Research Lead and Brand Strategist at Gigodesign, based in Slovenia. His work is focused on design-driven innovation, service development and customer experience. He is a partner at the KCDM Competence Centre for Design Management. primoz.mahne@ gigodesign.com

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When Marin Medak, adventurer and entrepreneur, came to Gigodesign with the proposition to partner up on his online glasses store, he got our attention.

Yet, as for any investment opportunity, no matter how brilliant and disruptive the idea, we needed to minimise risk.

That’s why we decided to validate it.

Marin was inspired by Warby Parker, a successful US eyeglasses company known for pioneering free ‘try-on’ at home. He aimed to add a key additional feature: All three pairs of glasses in the try-on kit would be fitted with the customer’s prescription lenses. This meant going beyond the mirror at home and being able to try the glasses during daily life (the office, school, university, social events, etc.). By vertically integrating the supply chain, he was able to avoid the monopolies which dominate the industry, achieving big savings which would be passed on to customers. This translated to 50 percent lower prices – a remarkable reduction. Yet, lower prices were only part of the equation. Marin saw his main competitive advantage as being

the innovative buying experience – giving customers more time and freedom to try on glasses and make their final selection.

This all sounded promising, but was there real potential in this business idea for the European market?

Developing the service prototype In order to validate the proposal, we developed a ‘minimum viable service’: A plan for the seven-day home-try experience of real glasses with built-in prescription lenses. A critical aspect of the service prototype was the fact that we were actually selling the glasses, and we set the required sales conversion rate at 20 percent. Anything lower and we’d turn down the opportunity, anything higher and we’d invest.

Breaking the prototype Once we had our prototype planned out, we thought of possible scenarios where our prototype would fail and tried to identify issues that would prevent us from getting valid, unbiased, objective data we could eventually act

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The mock brand was instru­mental in creating

Are you looking for new prescription glasses and would like to participate in an innovative purchase experience?

a required perception

We distributed this

of quality and perceived

recruitment ad on

product value

social media

upon. In our case, we had to ensure our potential customers would seriously consider buying our product. This meant we needed to establish a certain level of trust and perceived quality.

Beyond the product itself, customers develop perceptions of the quality of every touchpoint they come into contact with. This is why we developed a mock brand, named ‘Loook’, and designed the asso­ciated brand identity, packaging for home-try ­shipping and brand communication guidelines. We didn’t put much effort into the overall brand development – such as brand values and positioning – because it wasn’t crucial. Efficiency was king at this point!

Recruiting the right users Validating the business model through sales performance meant we had to find people who were actively looking to buy new glasses and were in the middle of the buying process. We therefore set additional conditions: Potential customers were 20 to 35 (to avoid ‘extreme’ prescriptions), who held recent prescriptions and were available to meet with us for one hour.

Our boldest recruitment idea was to give flyers to people coming out of bricks-and-mortar eyewear shops in shopping centres, but we soon discarded it, because we didn’t want to draw unwanted attention from future competitors.

In the end, we designed a simple banner and posted it on Marin’s social media (mainly Twitter). Even though we could motivate people to participate by promoting our attractive pricing, we decided against it. We didn’t want price-sensitive customers, but rather people who were interested in a new way of buying glasses.

Designing the prototype as a research platform We developed our service prototype protocol to gather relevant insights beyond the validation itself, which would prove valuable later on when we developed the service in more detail.

The first stage consisted of the participant visiting our studio for a short interview. We wanted to understand their online shopping attitudes and habits, especially those connected to clothing and footwear. That’s because these types of purchases share the same characteristics as for eyewear – users typically want to try the product on before purchase to ensure fit or evaluate several options or styles.

Next, we created the selection process. In online shops, this is usually done on-screen, but since we were at a very early stage, we used printed photos of each frame, taken from three different perspectives.

This was a perfect opportunity to observe how participants were comparing, choosing and selecting their favourite frames. What was their behaviour?

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1. Recruiting participants Seeking those who are actively looking to buy new prescription glasses.

2. User observation How do participants select their favourite frames?

3. Home-try prototype Participants get three glasses to try at home, including fitted lenses.

4. Prototype feedback Did they make a purchase?

What was the home-try experience like?

5. Validation analysis Did we pass the validation threshold? What have we learnt?

The process was designed to provide deeper insights beyond mere validation

Were they comparing among a variety of frames or did they have a specific shape or colour in mind, and only considered frames matching those criteria?

Once we had each participant’s list of three chosen frames, Marin fitted the correct lenses and shipped the home-try kits by post. Participants had seven days to wear the glasses and decide if they wanted to purchase them. Following this trial period, we met our participants again to gather feedback and ask about their decision.

We learned what participants enjoyed the most was the ability to immediately swap old glasses with new ones and wear them in their normal life – at work or university – and get feedback from family, friends or colleagues.

We realised that the ability wear new glasses right away, in a trial scenario, was probably subject to a phenomenon that behavioural economists call ‘loss aversion’. That is, people tend to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. In other words, it’s better not to lose ¤5 you already have, than to find ¤5. In our scenario, once our participants got to try on the glasses, it became much harder to let them go.

The same principle explains why a car salesman is so interested in letting a customer test drive a new car.

Results and lessons learned As already mentioned, we set the bar for successful validation of this business model as being a 20 percent 22 Touchpoint 11-1

conversion rate. This meant that out of ten participants, at least two needed to make the purchase for us to make the investment. We decided on this relatively low threshold for several reasons, chief among them was that we had a limited number of different frames in stock, so participants had a relatively few options to choose from. We also wanted to avoid the same frames being chosen multiple times.

Even before we concluded the service prototype phase, we knew we had a winner on our hands.

We exceeded the validation limit fourfold: eight of the ten participants made a purchase.

This was a clear signal that the idea definitely had potential, so we decided to invest in the start-up. In January 2019 we launched Della Spina, first in Slovenia with other markets soon to follow. The business has been financially sustainable from the day one.

Uncharted territory This case study shows how service design prototyping can be hugely beneficial when a start-up needs to prove unequivocally the potential of its business idea to investors. I firmly believe there is value to be found at the fringe of our discipline, so I encourage service designers to get out of the usual circle of clients and reach out to the start-up ecosystem. Ask entrepreneurs how hard it is to convince investors to invest. Learn from

Introducing

Design Thinking Inhouse

angel investors how risky they feel it is to base their investment decisions on presentation decks alone.

This case study shows how running a simple proto­ type out in the wild, with real customers, can not only save time and effort polishing slides and finding investors, but also prevent massive headaches due to failed investments.

A very low-fidelity prototype of selecting frames online

Available as a digital download (PDF) for € 9.80. SDN members receive a special 15 percent discount.

Service Designing the ­ Start-up Ecosystem Bringing experience design to technology start-ups at scale Companies that invest in design are more likely to invest in R&D. From those listed in the Fortune 500 to those with the largest market capitalisations, embracing design appears a proven route to success. When looking a little deeper however, we find huge discrepancies in the understanding and adoption of design in Elmer Zinkhann is Head of ­Design at Digital Catapult.

Elmer runs a team that is responsible for design strategy, user experience design, brand and visual design. He has worked with and delivered experience design masterclasses to more than 50 start-ups.

Elmer also organised the London Global Service Jam 2019 and initiated a service design pilot partnership with the London College of Communication.

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early start-ups.

As the UK Design Council’s Design Economy Report1 highlights, companies that invest in design are more likely to invest in R&D, which in turn is hugely beneficial to the growth of the UK’s technology sector, and the need for successful start-ups within it. While this affects and grows the demand for start-ups, it is those tech savvy start-ups themselves that often are limited in resources and time to explore what is needed to create a sustainable business from a design perspective.

At Digital Catapult, our aim is to lower the barriers to adoption of emerging technologies, and in doing so, support the growth of the wider UK economy.

Therefore, it is critical that we help startups learn about the value of experience design2 and how to apply it in their everyday practice.

Innovation programmes for tech start-ups We frequently work with technology start-ups at early stages of maturity. To support them in becoming successful companies, we have developed focused innovation programmes that take them from having a prototype or minimum viable product to being ready for investment and growth (see Fig. 1).

Over a period of approximately three months we support around ten start-ups, providing them access to advanced facilities and multiple one-day masterclasses focusing on technology, business and design. At the end of a programme, the start-ups get to pitch and demonstrate their product or service to potential partners and investors.

1 The Design Economy, Design Council, 26 June 2018 – https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/ resources/report/design-economy-2018

2 Experience design is an umbrella term to cover service experience design, user experience design and brand experience design.

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Fig. 1: Innovation

Innovation programme overview

programmes and

Meetups

masterclasses for start-ups

Open call

Selection

Innovation programme announced and open for start-ups to apply

Screening and selection of start-ups to join after more detailed interviews

Connect the start-ups with industry players and other start-ups

Pitch / demo day Start-ups present and demonstrate services to industry and investors

Masterclasses One day sessions to learn about technology, experience design, business development, presentation skills and more

Experience design masterclass

1. Design introduction

2. Design sprint

3. Action plan

4. Presentations

Implementation

Framing service design and identifying the appropriate level of understanding of the cohort

Allow for learning by doing and being able to replicate activities that are useful at the stage they’re at

Giving the start-ups a practical guide that they own and that they can act on when they get back to their office

Reflection on the process, comparing and learning from each other’s outcomes

Providing support for delivering a design-centric approach for their business on a product, service or strategic level

Design maturity levels in tech-led start-ups In the past year alone, the design team has worked with over 50 start-ups by providing experience design masterclasses as part of the aforementioned innovation programmes. In addition, the team has facilitated challenge-led design sprints and provided experience design support on a one-to-one basis.

During the introduction of our experience design masterclasses, we always ask companies indicate where they believe they are positioned on the so-called Danish ‘design ladder’3 which describes design matu­ ri­t y (see Fig. 2).

Approximately 25 percent of start-ups on our pro­ grammes use design as an integral part of their development process or business strategy. These are design-aware or design-led companies who speak to their users, prototype, learn and iterate their product design or business strategy. Immersive technologies and some IoT companies tend to fall in this category because their products are typically more customer centric.

3 Design Ladder, Danish Design Centre, 6 May 2015 – https:// danskdesigncenter.dk/en/design-ladder-four-steps-design-use

Maturity levels across tech start-ups Spread Average Programmes:

1. Non-design

2. Design as form-giving

3. Design as a process

4. Design as a strategy

Machine learning Cyber security 5g networking Iot technologies Immersive technologies

Fig. 2: Design maturity across our technology

The remaining 75 percent of start-ups are tech-led rather than design-led and rarely have designers in their core team to drive user-centred or even visual design activities. This underrepresentation of design is particularly noticeable in companies that work with intangible technologies such as machine learning, cyber security and 5G telecommunications.

We address these different levels of design maturity for each group of start-ups by selecting hands-on activities that tackle immediate issues, helping them develop useful skills to better validate and test their service propositions.

Touchpoint 11-1 25

For the 75 percent, this means focusing on how to unearth user insights, how these affect user journeys, and how to rapidly iterate and test alternatives.

For the other 25 percent – the more design-mature companies – the focus of the masterclasses shifts to delving deeper into the mindsets of their target customers and developing clearer narratives that ­support refining their service propositions. We do this through exploring behavioural archetypes, to-be ­journeys and storyboarding in more detail (see Fig.3).

2. These start-ups tend to focus on the desires of their

clients rather than the needs of their clients’ customers.

The consequence of this is that they often work based on assumptions and an excitement about the technology, rather than truly understanding and articulating the end customers’ motivations to help them achieve their goals.

3. It’s difficult for technologists to fully understand the value of service design and user experience design expertise if design itself is mistakenly believed to be about aesthetics rather than about relevance to the customer.

Barriers to design adoption among tech-led start-ups Exposing tech-based start-ups to hands-on design The lack of design awareness amongst the majority of activities (technology-led) start-ups we work with is due to three To address these challenges, we help to lower the barriers main challenges. by exposing them to hands-on activities during the masterclasses. We show them that it’s possible and valuable 1. Real-world use cases and audiences are hard to find to clarify their relationships to various audiences and while a given technology is still young, making it Technology-driven / early stage Consumer-driven / more mature stakeholders, to identify key journeys and moments of difficult to imagine and describe a relevant and wellExperience design masterclass sprint Focus on user-centred design techniques Focus on enhancing and developing narrative interaction, and to test novel concepts. Even spending just defined context.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Activity

Benefit

Experience design introduction

Learn about the methodology, processes and outcomes of the four key stages in the design process a

Non-design

Design as form-giving

Design as a process

Design as a strategy

Fig. 3: Experience

Technology-driven / early stage

Consumer-driven / more mature

Audience mapping design

Focus on user-centred design techniques

Focus on enhancing and developing narrative

1.

Non-design

3.

Design as a process

Identify primary, secondarydesign masterclass sprint Experience and influencers of the activities users service

by maturity Interview training

how Activity to gather external level Learn views and methods to capture

Benefit

new insights Learn about the methodology, proExperience design cesses and outcomes of the four key Develop clear picture of knowns and Personas /Behavioural assumptions introduction about users context, stages in the design process a archetypes goals, motivations and needs Identify primary, secondary Audience Understand the context of use of users and influencers of the Empathy map / Value mapping service the product or service from a proposition canvas user’s perspective Learn how to gather external Interview views and methods to capture Identify keytraining moments, touchpoints, challenges, and opportunities of new insights Journey map the intended/current service Develop clear picture of knowns and Personas /Behavioural assumptions about users context, Identify keyarchetypes challenges to How might we / goals, motivations and needs address / define clear Jobs-To-Be-Done context-driven goals Understand the context of use of Empathy map / Value Introduce the concept canvas and value the product or service from a proposition user’s perspective LEGO® Serious Play® of left/right brain thinking to encourage lateral thinking Identify key moments, touchpoints, challenges, and opportunities of Journeyand map Explore concepts push the intended/current service ‘Crazy 8’ ideation start-up to think beyond the obvious solutions Identify key challenges to How might we / address / define clear Explore theJobs-To-Be-Done core service value context-driven goals Storyboarding and help define the narrative Introduce the concept and value LEGO® Serious Play® of left/right brain thinking to Rapid Create, validate and iterate encourage lateral thinking prototyping potential solutions Explore concepts and push ‘Crazy 8’ ideation start-up to think beyond the Create a plan to conduct user Action plan / obvious solutions interviews and usability tests User research guide Core design activity for the intended audience Recommended support activity Optional activity for deeper learning and application

Storyboarding

Explore the core service value and help define the narrative

Rapid prototyping

Create, validate and iterate potential solutions

Action plan / User research guide

Create a plan to conduct user interviews and usability tests

Core design activity for the intended audience

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Recommended support activity Optional activity for deeper learning and

2.

Design as form-giving

4.

Design as a strategy

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one day focusing on users will strengthen the start-up’s own understanding of the relevance of their proposition.

We begin by highlighting how their service impacts various audiences by mapping the primary users, secondary users and influencers on an audience map.

The problem that arises again and again is that start-ups haven’t considered the wider impact of their service; who else might need access to their product, who needs convincing of its value, and how they relate to each other.

Once we have established critical roles in the service, we can delve deeper into the needs, motivation and goals of key actors and establish their user journeys.

This is often the first time that start-ups consider what happens before and after ‘continuous use’ of their service, and what other touchpoints might be. This is because they tend to skip past awareness, sign-up/ set-up and onboarding phases. The value of looking at the wider journey is that key moments of interaction are identified, as well as the possible challenges, pain points and opportunities for improvement.

This sets the right frame for ideating new concepts that solve problems and add value instead of going into details and aesthetics. We then work through rapid prototyping techniques, get them to test their new proposition in the session, iterate, and develop an action plan for future user research.

This gives start-ups the confidence to make small, impactful changes and put it in front of their colleagues, customers and clients. Many of the start-ups we’ve worked with continue to use the journey/service map as a way to enrich their proposition and evaluate and iterate on their prototypes with customers.

Empower them by giving access to guides and templates The aim of the experience design masterclass is not just about the day itself, delving into the world of design, but also about what they can take away and apply. To enable this, they are given access to our guides and templates.

Applying this in their own business is not without its own set of challenges. One such challenge is that they often have limited access to sometimes very specialist users

to evaluate with. If this happens, we can follow up to get them in touch with specific participant recruiters and platforms, or in some instances we’ve helped start-ups plan and moderate user research or co-design sessions.

In other instances, we found that, while we may have interacted with one or two people from a start-up, they find it challenging to convince others in their company. Because it requires a small but significant change in mindset, we may provide follow-up sessions with their team to do more targeted support.

Conclusion Over the past year it’s been very exciting to see the start-ups consistently enjoying taking part in the experience design masterclasses and being able to apply it in their day-to-day practice.

We’ve had great feedback so far, including recommendations focusing on specific activities. This has led to us to develop a service design approach to business modelling which we’re trialling this year. Another area which we want to explore is a more specialised prototyping and testing masterclass, and how that fits better with development cycles to support a lean, iterative way of working.

The challenge we face as an organisation is to be able to scale our efforts to be able to more effectively support the start-ups on an on-going basis. One of the ways we’re doing this is by working with London College of Communication’s Masters service design students. This works for the students as it helps them experience working with start-ups, and for the start-ups this is a low-risk way to enrich their team with much needed service design expertise. As part of the design team’s vision, we want to highlight that experience design is crucial in creating a sustainable and successful start-up eco-system that helps drive the adoption of emerging technologies, ready to meet the demands of future markets and organisations.

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Making the Case for Service Design for Startups and Innovation Applying our mindset and ways-of-working in a new frontier Start-ups and innovation environments represent exciting, challenging and relatively-uncharted terrain for service design.

Despite the fact that we as service designers are barely visible in the start-up world, and mostly unmentioned in their literature, my own experience as a service designer working with start-ups Jesse Grimes has eleven years’ experience as a service designer and consultant. He is an independent practitioner, trainer and coach (kolmiot. com), and frequently works with start-ups and innovators, bringing a service designer’s perspective to help them create better products and services. Jesse is also Senior Vice President of the Service Design Network and Editorin-Chief of Touchpoint. jesse@kolmiot.com

and innovation programmes has proven to me that we can add significant value in these settings. In this article I’ll look at hurdles to address and overcome in terms of mindset, and suggest some practical ways service designers can address this opportunity.

The innovation imperative Large corporations today face threats from many sides. No longer can they assume that their customers of today will be customers tomorrow, and that their products and services will remain in demand for the years and decades to come. Several factors have made it much easier for start-ups to cover the distance from ‘Day 1’ to becoming a marketdisrupting threat to those corporations within seemingly no time.

Firstly, there are relatively low barriers for start-ups to enter the marketplace (and even become global players); with a good pitch deck and some demonstrated traction, huge amounts of venture

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capital are ready and waiting. Secondly, the ability to design and deliver fullydigital services – and create entirely new markets, often through providing new, scalable platforms that connect supply and demand – can be accomplished with relatively small initial investments.

Thirdly, resources (such as AWS) and techniques (blitzscaling, growth hacking and viral customer acquisition) enable incredibly rapid growth when the conditions are right. And lastly, customer demand and expectations steadily rise, just as the possibilities offered by new technologies do. Start-ups are nimble and hungry enough to adapt to these changes in ways that established organisations are typically not.

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From size and scale to the things that keep them up at night, start-ups are fundamentally different to large corporates

A start-up surge The aforementioned factors have allowed increasing numbers of start-ups to enter the market and shake its very foundations. The global start-up market created just over $3 trillion in value in the prior two years alone, and the eye-watering valuations of start-ups that grow big and go public mean that turnover rate of indices such as the Fortune 500 increases year on year.

Learning from the start-ups Considering those factors, a failure to innovate threatens to doom large organisations. While Amazon (with the third largest market cap world-wide) stopped resembling a start-up long ago, its ‘Day 1’ approach strives to keep it as adaptable and as fast in decision-making as a start-up.

Spurred by these existential threats, large organisations have realised that ‘business as usual’ won’t cut it anymore – they need to invest in innovation in order to stay relevant. Traditional, product-based R&D investments often aren’t an adequate means of succeeding at innovation. They often require huge investments of time, money and effort, and significant patience is required before it becomes clear if an idea pays off.

Accelerators, incubators and innovation platforms Instead of the old ways, a host of answers to this innovation challenge have arisen. Large organisations

now turn to hackathons and moonshot programmes, and establish accelerator programmes to try and rapidly evolve their products and services and even establish entire new business lines. And innovation portfolio management has arisen as a specialty, to strategically manage and guide these efforts.

The programmes themselves are inspired by a handful of approaches, often amalgamated into a company-specific methodology with a catchy name.

Lean Startup is chief among them, with its laser focus on trying to quickly find a profitable and validated business model with a minimum of effort. Agilebased development methods often play a role too, for the efficient way they can deliver code. And – closest to our comfort zone as service designers – Design Thinking imbues the value of a design mindset, and a focus on end users, in the entire package.

What’s the relevance to service design?

So, while it’s clear that start-ups and large organisations are very different, it’s interesting to us as service designers to see to what extent each of them recognise the value we add, make room for us in their organisations, and adopt our mindset and ways of working.

Putting the public sector, healthcare and education aside, there’s an overwhelming chance that any randomlyTouchpoint 11-1 29

chosen service designer in the private sector is working in a large corporate and not in an early-stage start-up.

This relative dearth of service designers in start-ups, and to a slightly lesser extent in innovation environments in general, represents a unique challenge and opportunity for our discipline. After all, as service design grows, it should discover new markets, helping to keep us all gainfully employed. And this drive for successful innovation means that opportunities exist for service designers in both environments.

A start-up's chief concern is to search for and identify a viable business model, and do so rapidly and efficiently

In this article I’d like to look at some of the apparent clashes between the start-up mindset and methodology, and how we as service designers think and work. I’ll then look at how we can adapt our practice and apply it to start-ups and innovation environments.

A different set of drivers From size and scale to the things that keep them up at night, start-ups are fundamentally different to large corporates. Their chief concern is to search for and identify a viable business model, and do so rapidly and efficiently.

Only once they have a measure of confidence that they’ve identified one, and have scaled their operations, do they start behaving like a typical organisation. But until that time, they follow a scripted routine.

Contrasts and challenges for service design The fact that service design is largely unknown amongst start-ups can be attributed to several factors. But a straightforward explanation is that service design is simply still not well-known in Silicon Valley. It’s there where some of the biggest dot-coms originated as start-ups and went on to become giants. Their stories became written-up in guidebooks and methodologies which have gone on to inspire today’s start-ups. With service design having become first established in the UK and Western Europe, and slower to gain traction in the U.S., service designers simply weren’t part of the earliest teams at Dropbox and Linkedin, and are therefore not linked to those success stories.

Several more contrasts between a start-up’s mindset, and the service design approach, can be identified:

I’ve tackled this challenge of working with start-ups myself over the past three years, and been lucky enough to find opportunities to apply my skills and expertise in what are stimulating, exciting and challenging environments, especially when considered next to typical longterm service design engagements, where seeing work through to implementation doesn’t always occur. I’ve also encountered my share of frustrations, and seen where significant barriers existed, which hindered my ability to really fulfil my role.

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Product mindset vs. service mindset – While it’s easy — to dismiss this contrast as just being about semantics, there is a clear difference in the language and mindset between start-ups and service designers. Start-ups employee ‘product owners’ and ‘product designers’, consider ‘product-market fit’, and eventually grow into siloed, product-oriented organisations. This is different to the holistic approach to research, design and implementation of services, as applied by service designers.

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or ‘teaser’ landing pages, and they are considered a success when people demonstrate (purchase) interest in what is being offered – a very one-dimensional perspective. Very little additional contextual information about potential customers is ever derived during start-ups discovery activities. Contrast this to the range of prototyping activities that can be employed by service designers – not just online, but physical ones such as desktop walkthroughs, investigative rehearsal and even paper prototypes – and you’ll see we can learn far more about how a (prototype) service behaves with customers.

Learning to create the canvases used by start-ups is an easy extension of a service designer's arsenal of tools and techniques

Shallow customer understanding vs. deep customer — empathy – Lean Startup holds a very simplistic view of customers; it’s primarily concerned with discovering their pains and then offering a solution in the form of a product. Even ‘customer development’ activities – which are intense and create lots of data – don’t create a holistic understanding of the wide variety of customers that the service will eventually have. Furthermore, simple deliverables such as personas are rarely developed.

On the other hand, service designers orient themselves entirely towards the customer, and apply a wide variety of research methods to gain a deep understanding – and empathy – for who those customers are.

Simplistic product ‘validation’ vs. a range of prototyp — ing techniques – In Lean Startup, teams carry out ‘experiments’ (tightly focussed user tests, often done online and at scale rather than one-on-one) to validate aspects of their proposition. These can be run as Facebook ads

‘Product-in-a-vacuum’ vs. a holistic understanding of a — service – As touched on before, start-ups typically have a blinkered approach to developing their ‘product’.

Little or no effort is spent on understanding the experience of customers over time – and with all aspects of a service – such as is captured in a journey map. Things that are considered superfluous to core functionality (yet are very important from a user perspective, such as providing customer service) are often ignored or haphazardly addressed farther down the road. Service designers take a different approach of course, designing and orchestrating a service from a strategic point of view, thereby ensuring better customer experiences.

The fundamental notion of service-dominant logic, and the value it assigns to service transactions and a service perspective, is entirely alien to a typical start-up.

Solution focus vs. problem focus – Far too often, it — seems as if start-ups spring into life because they’ve found a new, technology-driven ‘solution’ which they want to sell to the market. Despite even Lean Startup’s insistence on ‘problem-solution fit’, I’ve seen startups doggedly pursue different variations on their same concept, despite research which showed the problem they thought they were addressing wasn’t even experienced as a problem by their customers.

Conversely, service designers thoroughly immerse themselves in understanding problems, before looking to design appropriate solutions. “Love the problem, not the solution”, as the saying goes.

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The Service Perspective for Innovation Canvas Through the course of my work with several start-ups, I’ve developed a one-page canvas which helps build the case for applying service design, within a single short workshop.

Finding the opportunity for service design Now with all that being said, you wouldn’t be mistaken for thinking the situation looks bleak for service designers who hope to add value to start-ups. While it can be a challenge to overcome those clashes in focus and mindset, I have found that I can still add significant value with my start-up clients. Part of that success comes from having determined how to best position myself.

Successful innovations consist of three essential ingredients: A unique concept, with demonstrable value for customers, underpinned by a viable business model. To identify how a service designer can help a start-up achieve all three, it helps to look at which elements are a natural match for our skill-set and approach, and which require us to learn new things.

Identifying and developing the unique concept is familiar terrain for us, to which we can apply our proven techniques of ideation, co-creation and prototyping, all informed by research-based insights. Similarly, the question of value can be answered by our ability to apply additional research and prototyping techniques, and then test those prototypes with customers. The last ingredient – developing a sustainable and profitable business model – is less familiar terrain for most service designers, but for those in consultancy settings, and with business design skills, it’s less of a challenge.

Canvasses are a familiar format for start-ups – they are created collaboratively (ideally lead by a facilitator), trigger valuable discussions and decision-making, and remain visible on the wall as a shared reference.

And because start-ups can benefit from a truly holistic, customer-centred design perspective as they set out, this canvas reinforces the importance of a service design perspective early on. By building awareness of the many aspects that service design touches upon, it can effectively lay the groundwork for it to be applied systematically, going forward.

Organisational vision The overarching vision for what the organisation wants to achieve for the future. This should already exist, as a vision statement or mission statement, and can be copied here.

Service vision The desired experience the organisation wants to deliver when its customers interact with its products and services. This is often not yet articulated, but should represent a powerful, differentiating factor. It should be a short statement, articulated in aspirational and experiential terms, and informed by any existing insights.

Challenges These are internal and external factors that are potential barriers to achieving the Service Vision. They may include regulations, legal issues, complex processes, technical limitations, etc. Despite a start-up’s small size, organisa-

Getting your foot in the door In the following section I’d like to share some advice on how you can best fulfil your role as a service designer working with a start-up, or an innovation environment. But first, I’m assuming that you already have your foot in the door at a start-up, or somewhere like an accelerator or incubator. Getting in contact with stand-alone start-ups is a challenge itself, and something I’ve addressed by running a series of halfday workshops in Europe and Asia, in which 32 Touchpoint 11-1

tional issues impacting the service could also go here.

Service delivery context This area is used to capture factors which concern how the service will be provided to customers. These include touchpoints and channels (eventually) utilised, timescale and chronological flow of service, third-party service providers and touchpoints, etc. If research-based insights already exist concerning known or expected pain points or ‘a-ha’ moments, they can be placed here.

Service Perspective for Innovation Canvas

Trends

Challenges

Customer context

Service delivery context

Trends This is where expected developments which will impact the service delivery are collected. They may include predicted changes in customer expectation, competitor advancements, new technologies, regulations or legal issues, etc.

Customer context This contains high-level insights about target customers, such as pains and gains, demographics, JTDs, existing solutions/workarounds and their current alternatives to the start-ups service offering. Questions to guide customer

A downloadable SPI canvas template and instruction guide are available on the author’s website: www.kolmiot.com/ resources.

research may be captured, or current assumptions, but these should be validated/replaced by future findings.

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I introduce the value of service design to them, through demonstrating our perspectives and tools.

It’s often easier to find employment within an accelerator or corporate innovation environment, where you are provided as a coach to multiple startup teams and paid out of a separate budget, rather than approaching standalone start-ups. However, I’ve had success in both situations, coaching multiple start-ups with ING’s accelerator programme in Amsterdam, as well as my current work with an independent blockchain-based start-up in The Hague.

I’ve even used a Trojan Horse technique, entering a Dutch fintech for a short interaction design assignment, and once inside, convincing them of the value of service design and establishing the role myself.

Five tips for succeeding as a start-up service designer Once you’ve created the opportunity to work within the unique environment offered by a start-up (or in something such as an accelerator), there are several tips I have to increase your impact and bring success to your role.

1. Learn to be a chameleon – By adapting your language,

techniques and skills to this new environment, you’ll blend in and find success more easily. This means being flexible in how you name and describe your activities and even your role – at least at first.

You’ll learn that your prototyping and testing experience leaves you well suited to do ‘experiment design’, and your customer research skills mean you can do ‘customer development’ just as easily.

2. Create a ‘service ecosystem’ with the team – By

holding a workshop to create this shared, holistic picture of the service they’re busy developing, you’ll expose them to issues they surely wouldn’t have otherwise ­identified, and in doing so, effectively introduce your unique mindset and value as a service designer. I’ve written about this visualisation of mine previously (see “­Using a Service Ecosystem 34 Touchpoint 11-1

to Quickly Grasp Complexity” in Touchpoint Vol. 10 No. 2), and it forms a core part of my half-day course for start-ups. It should also be added that journey maps are also very valuable.

3. Get comfortable with canvases – Pinning down

their value proposition and business model are critical concerns for a start-up, so learn how to create their associated canvasses: the ‘Value Proposition Canvas’ and ‘Business Model Canvas’.

In fact, there are handfuls of canvasses and card kits that are all relevant for start-ups, from innovation and ideation triggers and techniques, to the Platform Design Toolkit and Futurice’s Lean Service Creation methodology. Our existing skills at facilitation and workshop leadership means these are easy to add to our arsenal of tools, and they fit a start-up’s needs very well.

4. Push the service perspective – Encourage the

team to break free of the ‘product’ mindset and realise that they’re creating a service. This is partially accomplished by activities such as mapping the service ecosystem and customer journeys, and partially through directly challenging the team to orchestrate their service from a strategic perspective. Have they thought about the role of customer service? And the hand-offs between touchpoints and channels (from an app to a website, for example)?

5. Learn the start-up language – ‘Customer develop-

ment’, ‘validation’, ‘experimentation’, even ‘series A financing’… Start-ups come with a world of new terms, some of which describe relatively familiar activities, and some of which are totally unique. It pays to read the literature and learn their language, in order to best grasp what makes these businesses different, and what role descriptions, activities and milestones mean.

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In conclusion Start-ups don’t offer the stability of working inside a bank, and nor do they come with the variety of assignments offered by a specialised service design agency or large consultancy. However, their highpressure environments, and the opportunity to make a significant impact by having a strategic role from the very start, makes them a worth-while and challenging prospect for service designers. And where stand-alone start-ups prove too difficult to reach, service designers can still work with them in the fast-growing world of accelerators, incubators and corporate innovation, oftern offering far more than a shallow ‘Design Thinking coach’ who runs a single workshop and leaves teams to get on with it.

Despite some pretty significant challenges to be overcome in terms of mindset and perspective, an adaptable service designer who’s willing to take some risks and learn a new set of skills can find great opportunities working with start-ups, just as I have. I hope that what I’ve shared in this article inspires others to move in the same direction.

­ Interested in learning more?

Jesse Grimes will be joined by Strategic Innovation Designer Kevin Quint (Element119) to give a workshop at the upcoming SDN Global Conference in Toronto. “Service Design for Startups - Adapting Our Practice for a New Frontier” will be offered on Day 1 of the con­ ference, 10 October 2019. Visit www.service-design-network.org/ sdgc/2019 to learn more and register.

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Uplifting Service Culture in Large Organisations Piloting customer-centricity and collaboration with senior managers to scale-up service design practice and deliver value In large organisations, there are always people willing to adapt to a more customer-centric and value creation approach, but often they face many barriers in implementing the necessary practices to realise these ambitions. The obstacles vary, however, and they are usually associated with a lack of customer dialogue and a resistance to changing normal operations to enable collaboration and quick decision-making processes.

Jane Vita is a Design Director at Digitalist, with 20 years’ experience in digital products and services, including strategy, implementation, performance, cultural fit and cross-platform design, helping clients to discover their digital future. jane.vita@digitalistgroup.com Jocelyn Ng is a Experience ­Design Lead at Digitalist, helping organisations to build products and services that improve experiences with technology through holistic design, employing systems thinking to deliver business value. jocelyn.ng@digitalistgroup.com Andrew Thong is Senior Service Designer at Digitalist, a ­problem solver combining years of experience in tech and design in telecom, transportation and heavy industry. andrew.thong@digitalistgroup.com

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In this article, we will concentrate on the challenges of senior managers – a group of practitioners that have the power to make changes, but could often benefit from having a more holistic approach, in which they consider all the necessary actions to deliver a more integrated and meaningful experience journey for end customers. Sometimes called ‘lone wolves’, they are managers who attempt to challenge the status quo. They begin by bringing new ideas and motivation to their teams in order to explore new ways to generate value for customers. These ideas typically start as small projects and take advantage of available resources.

A recent example, a small project from one of our clients, involved introducing a self- service concept. With our help, the client initiated several activities and

proofs-of-concept to understand and test which service touchpoints would benefit customers if they were brought to digital interfaces. It turned out that many opportunities were owned elsewhere in the organisation, and we needed to invite other teams – sometimes siloed ones – to act and commit to our end goals.

Together with our client, a senior manager and his small team, we pre­ sented the results of our experiments to a broader audience in the organisation.

The success of the experiment concepts and the voice of the customers caught the attention of higher-level managers, who decided to merge the teams into a ‘Digital Experience’ department, to successfully scale the perceived outcomes.

This brought in new stakeholders that were not yet familiar with the service

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design approach that we implemented earlier, and our team was pulled quickly in many directions at once.

We started facing many challenges as a result of internal politics, and our initial change-makers were sidelined as many other senior managers wanted to steer the ship.

However, the rocky transition gave us, a thirdparty vendor, the opportunity to add value and lay the foundations of service culture that motivated collaboration and a continuous dialogue between the organisation and its customers while scaling service innovation and design best practices to other teams.

Next, we will share the key learnings from our experience with working in projects like the one mentioned above.

The challenges of engaging stakeholders in large organisations Collaborative, customer-centric methods challenge existing ways of working and can feel threatening to stakeholders who are used to being the sole sources of strategy and business direction. Internal politics also play a factor in receptiveness to new methods and customer-centric process.

To ensure the adoption and continuation of service design practices, we regularly communicate and showcase the rapid successes of our concept design experiments, and we involve people in the organisation that are willing to contribute as well as onboard and engage them in the new approach and mindset. Because they feel proud and confident about their work and achievements, we ask them to be our advocates and help us to encourage other people to embrace the service culture.

A service culture puts the individual at the heart of the matter, is action-oriented and promotes creative thinking to problem-solving. It co-evolves in a knowledge environment, to discover and mobilise expertise regardless of the job description. It also enables the growth of global knowledge which is shared across communities of practice and not in organisational or administrative silos.

When speaking about service design return on investment (ROI), consider whether the organisation’s primary goal is securing funding for innovative ideas, better customer acquisition, operational costs savings

or something else entirely. Knowing your audience and tailoring the message of service design activities towards these individuals helps them to understand the benefits of the approach and embrace the new ways of working.

How to bring stakeholders together So far, we noticed that many of the service challenges and unserved areas are sitting in a space where there is no clear organisational ownership. To solve this problem and add value to services, we need to motivate several teams to work together. To facilitate this collaboration, we ran co-creation workshops and activities where the goal was to encourage cross-silo dialogue.

A very effective co-creation activity is the creation of current and future state service blueprints to illustrate shared success and common goals between stakeholders.

A common outcome after walking through a blueprint is increased awareness of communication needs between stakeholders and departments. Keeping the current state blueprint alive helps the teams to follow the progress and motivates them to move forward towards the vision.

Co-creation activities can create a safe space for sharing information; constraints and perspectives help different departments envision future possibilities. Co-creation activities such as business model cards and individual idea generation reduce hierarchy in the room and help avoid “I’m right, you’re wrong” opinion-based arguments.

Change management during the transition to a culture of customer centricity New ways of working in the organisation can be intimidating to existing product, marketing or business strategy departments and therefore often trigger resistance. Questions such as, “How will my position be affected?” or, “Will the function of my department change?” often simmer under the surface due to a lack of leadership vision and planning on the effects of innovation, such as transparent communication.

A seasoned facilitator will help guide constructive conflict or disagreement whilst shedding light on concerns or misconceptions between departments. This means taking the lead or encouraging stakeholders to Touchpoint 11-1 37

Customer research outcomes needed to increase business confidence High

Incremental improvements to defined solutions

Validated customer need, vetted and feasible solution that will generate value for business

Validate hypotheses and refine solutions High opportunity for innovation impact

Business confidence required

Verification of current state

• User patterns and insights “A hah!” moments • Determine value creation points • Generate requirements for concepts • Information architecture and content grouping for foundational structure

• Domain knowledge comprehension • Prioritise information and task to user needs (MVP) • Find usability issues • Validate solution

• Triangulation point for quantitative data • Measure indicators of success • Generate points to probe for qualitative data (why)

• Remove visual bugs • Text and copy issues • Find navigation issues • Layout issues • Test for pure usability issues

Zone of Risk The further you move towards feature implementation and use ‘in the wild’, the higher the required level of business confidence becomes.

Early activities have a greater potential to increase business confidence and discover the

Research and feedback activities should be done to mitigate risk and expense and push features out of this zone.

unknown.

Increasing confidence in early stages will have the greatest impact.

Low Internal organisational hunch, no customer needs recorded

Problem definition/ requirements

Concept prototype and workflow validation

Ui design and interaction validation

Post-launch monitoring

Feature development life cycle

Fig. 1: Building business confidence and diminishing risk during the development process

better communicate decision-making, vision, goals and strategy. It also means clarifying each individual role and how they can help and making sure that people are aware of managers' expectations and efforts, and vice-versa.

Easing change through familiar tools Using the same centralised tools available to all stakeholders and departments to house service blueprints, canvasses and other outputs can facilitate their introduction. Platforms used across the organisation — such as SharePoint and Confluence — offer familiarity, ease-of-access and discoverability. Emails and chat messages can quickly slip through the cracks.

A platform tool can easily become a centralised-hub for touchstone pieces. Be careful not to let items sit on the shelf too long and become irrelevant.

38 Touchpoint 11-1

Scaling design, technology and other business capabilities Scaling service design to wider teams and departments results in new procedures, processes and people. New ways of working can become cumbersome to navigate — due to onboarding and possible resistance — but it is crucial to maintain momentum while scaling. Onboarding of new teammates is just as important as the customer and end user onboarding. Nailing down the process and vision are crucial in bringing contributors on board and can reap long-term benefits to project planning. Get familiar with Design Ops and Dev Ops — they help lay the foun­ dations to establishing efficient processes. You do not need to master both, but understanding their roles in delivering digital services will help to measure the impact of speed, efficiency and innovation on the business.

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Assessing and diminishing risk Service designers can perform customer research and build dialogue between the organisation and customers to assess risk and bring clarity to the process and outcomes. Remember: Risk can also be perceived, and risk is more often associated with intangible outcomes.

Creating tangibility diminishes perceived risk, that can come in the form of financial, time, performance, social and psychological risks.

3. User interface and interaction design validation –

In the case of digital services, as the development goes forward, many incremental features and changes can lead towards different directions. Make sure to retain consistency and follow the value proposition by validating with customers. By applying customer research and testing, we can identify and resolve usability, navigation, layout, visual and copy issues.

4. Post-launch follow-up – Follow customer behaviour

In Fig. 1, we provide an example of how we communicate to our clients the importance of building a dialogue between customers and organisations to assess and diminish the risks of negative results and build business confidence during continuous service features development.

and the usage of the service by setting data points to measure success and allow continuous improvement. By applying customer research, we can set triangulation points for quantitative data, measure indicators of success, and generate points to probe for qualitative data to understand the ‘why(s)’.

We divide the development process in phases: 1. Framing the problem, constraints and general

requirements – Early activities have a more signifi­cant

potential to increase business confidence and discover the unknown. It is essential to understand the service context and the many constraints that can help the team to roadmap and prioritise for the implementation of features during later phases. By applying customer research, we can identify user patterns and insights (including “Aha!” moments), determine value creation points, generate requirements for concepts, deter­ mine information architecture and content grouping for foundational structure, as well as understand the many operational areas in the organisation that might be affected by the new service structure.

2. Concept definition and workflows validation –

Service iterations help to steer the service in the right direction, testing service interactions, critical situations and continuous improvement based on customer feedback. By applying customer research, we can identify domain knowledge comprehension, prioritise information and tasks to user needs (MVP), find usability issues and validate a solution.

Breaking down silos between departments Departmental functions, titles and ownership can quickly interfere with progress, sometimes unintentionally.

Knowledge sharing and collaborative activities are not enough if everyone returns to the status quo after a workshop. Action items highlight progress, but we’ve had more success bringing people together to collaborate on ecosystem maps because teams coidentify and rectify critical points affected by silos, and are held accountable for their timely completion.

Starting with small pilots and bringing quick wins into the organisation helps stakeholders to see the benefits of a service design approach. Its holistic scope shows how important it is to the organisation to have people working together to achieve a great result that engages customers in a value creation dialogue. It also reveals blind spots and challenges many of the existing managerial practices that may not have been otherwise addressed.

As service designer practitioners we should aim to help managers increase their understanding of their business as consumers do – to stop merely looking at numbers and charts – and focus on understanding the impact their actions can create for their team and customers.

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Understanding People vs.

Getting Things Delivered A tricky balance between empathy and speed in ­innovation It is our role, as service designers, to help challenge the assumptions that companies, business managers and often product ­owners have at the start of a project. It is also our role to advocate for empathy and a deep understanding of users. However, we are not the only ones who know the way of getting there.

Weronika Rochacka Gagliardi is Co-Founder and Design Strategist at design provision, a Warsaw-based service design and design strategy agency. Before setting up her company, she worked at the Design Council in London. weronika@design-provision.com Ludmiła Rychter is Senior Innovation Lead at ING ’ ˛ski, PACE coach of Bank Sla several accelerator teams and service designer in everyday initiatives. She is passionate about business model innovation.

Adam Kryszkiewicz is ­Pro­ duct Owner at Docplanner, cur­rently helping users in 25 countries to find the right doctor and book a visit.

He previously worked in e-commerce, education and real estate marketplaces.

He is pas­sionate about working in interdisciplinary teams.

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In this article, we'd like to share our experiences of working with big corporates, as well as start-up style companies, applying service design to drive innovation. At design provision we have more than ten years of practical experience, being involved in more than a dozen accelerator-type projects in Poland and abroad, and having worked together with innovation consultancies and start-ups, we see how service design can add value in an environment focused on acceleration, minimising the cost and effort of launching a product or a service into the market. But firstly, it is important to reflect on the changes that started several years ago and that are now shaping the way we work.

The need for change Some years ago, when we were external service designers hired by companies, we delivered projects which were entirely focused on Design Thinking and the service design approach. These were structured

around the four phases of the Double Diamond model: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. We were in the luxurious position of being able to focus on a project for about six months, run full-on, deepdive discovery research sessions to fully understand users’ problems, and then come up with solutions related directly to their needs. When we look back at that time, we feel somewhat sentimental.

Nowadays, everything is speeding up.

Our clients are changing. We need to work faster and deliver results quicker.

We learn from other methodologies, such as Agile and Lean start-up. It feels like it is only the combination of all these different perspectives that can provide real value to users and the organisations that serve them.

The perspective of a global corporation The first example we’d like to share comes from well-known global banking brand ING. As Ignacio Juliá Vilar, previously

Credit: Sylwia Tomanek

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ING Innovation Lab in Katowice, Poland

ING’s Chief Innovation Officer, once said, “If we don’t go faster, if we don’t evolve our business faster, we will stop being relevant for our customers”. This reasoning is behind the creation of ‘PACE’, ING’s innovation methodology. PACE combines three approaches: Design Thinking/service design, Agile and Lean start-up. The idea behind it is that service design brings in empathy and a better understanding of customer needs, Agile brings a smarter way of working, and Lean start-up brings openness to experimenting and risk-taking.

Having taken part in ING’s accelerator pro­ grammes in Poland and Germany, we had the chance to experiment with this hybrid way of working.

need to take into account the characters of people and their preferred ways of working. It is an invaluable investment to spend some time at the beginning of the project with the team, using tools such as Team Canvas or similar, and to talk openly about what excites us and what frustrates us at work. It helps a lot with managing team dynamics during the whole process. ING truly understands the role of team dy­ namics in innovation, and therefore created the role of a ‘PACE Coach’ who acts a bit like a scrum-master, while at the same time plays the role of a challenger for the team when it comes to project outcomes.

2. Provide a clear structure and maintain discipline.

Lessons learnt While service design plays an important role in PACE, it also has to constantly re-invent itself and overcome its limitations to deliver more value within the global corporate concept. Some of the key lessons we have taken so far from this adventure as service designers: 1. Spend time to get to know your team. We know

that it is crucial to work in interdisciplinary teams, and it’s great to see that this is becoming a popular practice within many companies. However, we also

Service design gives a wide perspective. It helps get beyond standard metrics and drill down to real issues that need to be resolved for users and stakeholders. At the same time, there is the trap of spending too much time on research, digging through all the material we have managed to collate during the Discover phase. Sometimes it is difficult to see when ‘good enough’ is enough. When working in an agile manner, defining sprints and clear goals helps and facilitates greater discipline and progress. This is especially helpful for less experienced teams.

Touchpoint 11-1 41

3. Context is king and focus is important. This one is

tricky. It happens that within different accelerator set-ups, teams ‘share’ service designers who might work on two or more projects at the same time. On one side, their role is to empower team members to develop skills in research, persona development, customer journey mapping, designing and prototyping. On the other side, we know from our own perspective how much time we ourselves needed to learn about the process, the tools, how to work with them and what mistakes to avoid. It is very easy to become superficial and assume that we have understood the problem.

Only with a certain focus, time and dedication we can see things that are not that obvious at first sight.

The perspective of a start-up with a global reach The second example we’d like to discuss comes from a slightly different set-up. Docplanner Group focusess on “making the healthcare experience more human”.

Its services are present in 25 countries around the globe and are known under different names, such as ‘ZnanyLekarz’ in Poland, ‘Doctoralia’ in Spain and South America, ‘Doktortakvimi’ in Turkey and ‘MioDottore’ in Italy. Docplanner is a platform connecting doctors with patients. It focuses on helping users find a doctor and book a visit, while providing doctors with online appointment booking solutions.

Even though Docplanner is now a big company (with 1,000 employees across six locations worldwide), the company sees itself much more as a start-up rather than a corporation.

At Docplanner, there is a UX team which works be­­ tween offices in Warsaw and Barcelona. Back in 2017, the team decided that they would like to learn more about their users (‘patients’, as they call them) to better understand them and therefore design better solutions for them.

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Innovation and the role of empathy at ING “Empathy, experimentation and evidence – those are the three E’s that are crucial to creating a successful service. While Design Thinking provides what we need to understand the context and customers’ needs and values, it’s smart to make use of other methods to learn rapidly and bring evidence. Lean start-up is about quick and cheap experimentation and willingness to learn. Agile brings a positive attitude, a cando approach and a thirst for knowledge — it’s the mindset supported with ceremonies.

But let’s not forget about the well-knowns, such as good scoping, environment mapping and using data we already have. Those can be powerful and allow us to understand the challenge better. Yes, a unique value proposition (UVP) is at the heart of every innovation. But team alignment on the ‘why’ is crucial for successful implementation.

I’m always engaging teams in empathybuilding activities. If we have the UVP and we have team alignment – add the business model and we have the recipe. Let’s mix and match for successful innovation with human experience in the centre.”

Ludmiła Rychter, Senior Innovation Lead at ING Bank Śla˛ski

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Docplanner offices in Warsaw, Poland. On the left, persona ‘work in progress’ posters, one of the ways of engaging the wider company team with project outcomes.

Credit: Docplanner

the team at the beginning, it is worth establishing a common understanding of the project, as well as the tools. Having these conversations can really smooth communication within the team, especially when you are working across different countries.

Lessons learnt Here we want to share lessons from this particular collaboration with Docplanner: 1. Service design helps teams see the whole context

of a user experience beyond what happens on the screen. Start-ups are fast and focus on getting to the point. It may be a challenge to ask a team to step back and reflect on a wider context. In this particular case, it was crucial that as a team we went beyond the user experience of the platform itself, and spent additional time understanding the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ experiences of finding a doctor and booking an appointment. Taking part in qualitative research and then participating in the analysis phase was important for the team to develop empathy and see how the service plays a role in the lives of the patients. This was the foundation for developing personas, which now help the UX and product teams to design features, taking into account the different needs and contexts that users have.

2. Make sure we speak the same language. During

the project there were times that even though we felt we were talking about the same thing, we were actually not. This became clear in various conversations. Returning to spending time with

3. Advocate for a particular approach and explain the

process only as much as needed. It’s not about how you get there, but what you achieve and how it will be useful to the company. While some approaches might be relevant to companies that need to know the ‘how’, others will cut to the chase and focus on the ‘what’ and the next steps. It’s crucial to understand what the culture within a company is and prepare your updates accordingly. Focus on key messages and always be prepared to answer questions and confirm where the data you present comes from.

To sum up We truly believe that in fast-paced and often technology-driven environments, service design is all about gaining real empathy, human-centredness of the process and understanding the wider context. We help teams to ’think out of the box’ and see the world through the eyes of their users, go beyond data showing ‘what’ users are doing and explore the ‘why’ behind it. At the same time, we, as service designers, need to learn to work in those technology-driven environments to make our work (and ourselves) relevant.

A new, ‘unhurried’ way?

Finally, we’d like to share an interesting concept devel­ oped by Johnnie Moore and Antony Quinn, coaches Touchpoint 11-1 43

Credit: DESIGN PROVISION

and facilitators from the UK. As they describe it, “’Unhurried’ is about realising our capacity for learning and growth. It's about people getting more in tune with each other and using our human intelligence in a way that machines can't. Unhurried is not a lazy choice, it requires attention and commitment.”

As Moore and Quinn further explain: “With the rise of artificial intelligence and the growing digitisation of work, we need to allow humans to devote their energy to what humans uniquely can do, and which can’t be mechanised or industrialised.”

Why does ‘unhurried’ sound like an interesting concept to us? Because there is something about the dedication of time and focus that we often lack so dramatically at work since there is always so much to do. It also reminds us what service design truly is about – it’s about people and human-centredness in everything we do. These are the qualities that are crucial to developing products and services that will keep changing our world for the better.

Introducing service design at Docplanner “Having the proper service design process is crucial for a successful start-up to scale up. But carrying out such a process in a start-up environment might not be easy. It’s important to understand that these people have just created a successful company on their own, using their exceptional skills, hard work and great intuitive knowledge of users’ needs. They are really proud of their independence and are positively selfconfident. Not everyone within a start-up team will understand the necessity of the ‘laborious’ service design processes. That’s why internal communication is essential for a project to succeed. The best solution is to have a strong ambassador within the team. Someone who is able to speak the company’s language, knows individuals’ needs and interests. The same person should explain how the product team could use the outcomes of the service design process.

Start-up people are used to instant results.

During the fast growth stage, each developed feature and each UX amendment brings you immediate profits. Without clear explanations and relevant use cases, the service design process as such might not be valued. Having the right ambassador on the company side, who will link the product, UX and service design, will ensure that the company will use service design to see new business opportunities, develop better communication and — in our case — basically make healthcare more human.”

Adam Kryszkiewicz, Product Owner at Docplanner

Data analysis as part of persona development with Docplanner team

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Putting Service Design at the Heart of Corporate Innovation What works and what doesn’t Innovation is a dominant buzzword within the corporate landscape, and it is nearly impossible to find a company that does not declare itself to be customer-centric. However, regardless of the fact that innovation and customer centricity have been at the centre of attention for quite some time, few corporations have figured out Jana Kukk (PhD) has more than ten years of experience in service design. From January 2018 until March 2019 she was responsible for implementing service design culture in Luminor.

Today she is co-founder of Rethink, a strategic design consultancy, continuously supporting Luminor, as well as other clients in adopting design mindset. jana@rethinkers.co

46 Touchpoint 11-1

how to pull them off successfully.

The ‘innovate or die’ and customer cen­ tricity narratives have firmly ­established themselves. However, the bigger and older a business is, the harder it is for it to shift towards those practices.

Therefore, customer-centric innovation often remains a slogan behind which the old ways of working still prevail.

Newly-established organisations seem to address this challenge more easily; it’s significantly easier to develop innovation processes from the beginning, than to turn around an operating busi­ ness with its legacy, ongoing operations and business delivery metrics.

This is why, on 1 October 2017, when Nordea and DnB banks merged in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, there was a unique opportunity to get innovation right from the beginning. Or, at least, it seemed like that.

The new company, Luminor, incorpo­ rated two ‘old’ banks from three countries,

which in fact meant bringing together six different organisations into one.

The paradox of the situation was that alongside launching the new brand and making a public commitment to create a completely new, truly outstanding, customer experience from scratch, there were also six old cultures to shift and merge. The process of transition towards a customer-centric innovation culture had been started by the management.

The initial master plan Because building the new and enhanced customer experience required a sys­ tematic approach, Luminor’s management picked service design as the core method­ology. While the competitors were hiring generic innovation managers to drive cultural change, and hiring external consultants to execute service design as a project-based ­activity, ­Luminor

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became the first large corpo­ration in the ­region to commit to bringing design to a strategic ­level and to building an in- house service design team to steer innovation and shift the culture.

To help achieve that, the team took on a structured approach, addressing the three whales of organisational learning: knowledge, skills and attitudes.

A set of activities that addressed all three components was designed, in the hope that together they would result in a shift of organisational practices.

Awareness of the essence of service design (and managerial buy-in of the approach) was largely addressed through internal communication activities (such as intranet articles and videos introducing the concept), an e-learning ‘crash course’, and road­show presentations at various team events to showcase the concept, the team and results achieved at that point.

To develop the skills and encourage people to use service design tools in their daily work, an introductory workshop was designed and given on request.

The third piece of the puzzle – attitude – seemed to be the most complex to address. Because s­ hifting attitude requires a positive personal success experience, it was decided to apply service design

Hands-on service design workshops have helped various units to solve challenges they faced

Building service design competence in the organisation

Accumulating knowledge Internal communication Roadshow presentations E-course

Building attitude Service design hackathon

Developing skills Hands-on service design workshops for teams

Systemic approach to design-driven organisational change implemented in Luminor

at scale and quickly deliver tangible results. This led to an internal service design hackathon.

The aim of these simultaneous activities was to spread the service design mindset and practices across the organisation and to develop different units’ autonomous capabilities to innovate. After just a short while, service design started to gain attention. The internal communication campaign and the introductory service design workshops resulted in multiple user experience spin-off projects, both customer-oriented and internal.

An example of a quick win was the authentic implementation of a service design mindset in the ‘People & Culture’ unit. After their first encounter with design tools, they immediately initiated a holistic re-design of the employee experience, taking on various stages of employment lifecycle and making them simple and positively memorable for everyone involved.

It was genuinely surprising how, in such a short period, many early service design adopters turned into true user-centric evangelists. Anita Aboltina, Head of Learning and Development, reported that testing out the service design approach resulted in a dramatic Touchpoint 11-1 47

mindset shift for the whole team. “We are now used to reaching out to our users and quickly validating our assumptions,” she said. “Some months ago, it would feel uncomfortable to bother colleagues for a short interview on their experience. Now it seems very natural and we see the mutual benefit: learning firsthand about the experiences is helping us to make better services and thus resulting in happier employees.”

Erkki Raasuke, CEO of Luminor Bank, working at the first Design Thinking hackathon

More evidence of this quick success was that shortly after the service design hackathon was announced, one of the first participants to sign up was company’s CEO. The service design mindset appeared to be setting in. Just a few months into the journey, it looked as if the team was doing it right, and the full transformation was just around the corner.

The reality However, despite the promising start, the service designers quite quickly encountered various challenges.

First of all, too many of those who heard about service design’s existence actually grasped its strategic nature.

For the vast majority it still remained an operational function. They held the belief that service design was about ‘how it looks like’ rather than of ‘how it works’.

The second painful realisation was that after half a year in the process it became nearly impossible to move 48 Touchpoint 11-1

beyond the circle of early adopters. There was some insignificant expansion of the mindset, but it appeared that after a rapid start the scaling slowed down tremendously. The circle of people actively participating in hackathons, workshops and inviting service designers to be part of the projects was remaining the same – at about 10 percent of the 3,000-person organisation.

The third and probably the most significant shortcoming was the infamous gap between service design thinking and service design doing. Regardless of the great results achieved in the ideation phase – applying the service design tools, co-creating with users and thinking outside of the box – the list of the projects that have crossed the go-live line was incredibly sparse. After the excitement of ideation settled and the daily routine reality kicked in, many ideas were either left in drawers or vanished somewhere amongst endless Excel files and approval processes.

The next iteration It was quite evident that if the organisation wanted to move beyond ‘service design theatre’ and create some tangible impact, something needed to change. For that, instead of analysing what had been done wrong, the service design team decided to take the ‘bright spot’ approach: taking a closer look at the few projects delivered with positive results and trying to figure out what key success drivers those undertakings had in common. The answers popped up quite quickly.

Communicating the strategic dimension of design

Looking back, it appears as if ‘design’ was itself a misleading term. It inevitably brings to mind visual elements, and only those who experience the design process first-hand fully grasp the meaning of it.

To avoid this misunderstanding, the terminology was gradually changed when speaking to novice audience; instead of ‘service design’, ‘strategic design’ and ‘problem solving’ were used in its place.

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Expanding the circle

After analysing who became service design ‘fanclub’ members after the initial early-adopter circle had stagnated, it appeared that most people were newcomers to the organisation. This makes perfect sense – people who join a company are more eager to explore and test things out. They also aren’t yet burdened by old work habits and practices.

To enhance this bright spot, it was decided to ensure that every single new employee of the bank becomes fully aware of what service design is. Therefore, a two-hour interactive session on service design was added to the new employee onboarding day, across the entire organisation.

best seen from a distance, it’s still early to claim the successful introduction of the service design-driven innovation culture. However promising early results may appear, one still needs to be quite cautious in defining the described approach as ‘best practice’.

Nevertheless, it seems evident that taking the joy of applying service design outside the actual service design unit, and encouraging teams to implement it independently themselves, benefits the entire organisation. This is because people learn to see everything – ­including their daily activities – through the eyes of the user, leading them to simplify and humanise not just new products and services, but internal practices as well.

Closing the delivery gap

The remedy for failing to take the newly-designed solutions past the ideation phase – the most complex and impactful shortcoming identified – turned out to be a bit more complex and resource-demanding.

Based on observations, the projects in which owners remained in touch with the service design team during delivery were those that were successfully implemented. Conversely, which didn’t include a service designer gradually phased out.

So, what was the ‘secret sauce’ that service designers were adding to the implementation process?

In general, it seemed to be two things. Firstly, service designers called out when teams started reverting to ‘business as usual’, taking their focus away from the user and designing for regulations and processes. Secondly, service designers advised project owners when they or their team tended to overthink and overcomplicate things, thereby protecting the tangible scope of the delivery. In short, service designers seemed to be playing a coaching role similar to that in agile practice; not taking direct responsibility for the end result, but making sure that the team and the project stays on track.

All in all, accepting the fact that changing the course of an organisation of this size requires time, and also acknowledging that the benefits of cultural change are

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Touchpoint 11-1 49

Designing an Innovative Municipal Organisation Using service design to enable city-wide innovation A quick Google search for ‘innovation’ pulls up thousands of results: leading-edge technology, business school case studies, how-to guides for innovation in corporate environments, and more. ‘Innovation’ is a big, ambiguous term that often looks very different depending on where and how it is applied. Different Katie Monteith is a Director in PwC Canada’s Experience Practice. She’s worked in both the public and private sector, using service design to redefine a national defence organisation’s approach to service delivery, re-design a bank’s mortgage experience and imagine the future of telecommunications billing.

contexts for innovation include: sector (private or public), service delivery innovation versus business model innovation, a focus on innovation tools or on innovation outcomes, and evolutionary-scale innovation versus revolutionary-scale innovation. Each of these circumstances offer unique aspects and perspectives of innovation, and deliver different values.

In the summer of 2018, as PwC embarked on an innovation initiative with the City of Ottawa, there were two dimensions that focused our journey: service delivery innovation and the public sector. But what kind of innovation is possible in this heavilyregulated environment, where traditional private sector market forces aren’t present?

What is innovation?

For the City of Ottawa, Canada’s national capital, it started with a single (but far from simple) question: How do we embed innovation into the organisation, across every department?

What’s interesting about this particular question is its perspective. So much of 50 Touchpoint 11-1

what we see in municipal innovation tends to be focused on external initiatives, such as creating better places for people to live, work, play and visit. These initiatives include research and investment in Smart Cities activities, policies and programmes to attract government and private sector investment, building start-up communities and public/private partnerships. These are all critical initiatives, but they often require significant investment and partnerships.

Rarely do we see cities reflect on what’s required to build an innovative city from the inside out, looking internally at what’s required as an organisation to enable employees to create those external innovation initiatives at the grassroots level.

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With the support of the senior management team, and under the leadership of the Director of Service Transformation, Marc René de Cotret, PwC and the City of Ottawa partnered to answer the question that was posed, and understand how the city could embed, support, and empower innovation across all of its services and departments – starting from the inside.

From the outset, Marc understood the impor­ tance of clearly defining what innovation meant for the Ottawa. It meant building a unique definition of what innovation means in the public sector, within the city’s own organisation and operating model constraints, while at the same time keeping focus on delivering real results for ‘clients’ (the city’s term for a diverse group of end users, including residents, businesses, visitors, partners, etc.).

This meant moving beyond a theoretical exercise or falling back upon stereotypical innovation examples from Silicon Valley and tech start-ups. As Marc put it, “we’re not going to be developing the next iPhone at the City. Nor should we be measuring ourselves against that kind of innovation. If you’re a service delivery organisation, in a public sector environment, in a municipal setting, how do you define innovation that makes it something that’s real and tangible that can be incorporated into the way you deliver services to citizens?”

Why an Innovation Operating Model?

The city had a very clear need to identify actionable, implementable changes to its internal processes, operating model and culture in order to enable what it called ‘inno­vation at the edges’. This means innovation that happens closest to the point of

As Marc put it, “we’re not going to be developing the next iPhone at the City.

Nor should we be measuring ourselves against that kind of innovation. If you’re a service delivery organisation, in a public sector environment, in a municipal setting, how do you define innovation that makes it something that’s real and tangible that can be incorporated into the way you deliver services to citizens?”

service, empowering employees who are interacting with clients to identify the need for something to change, and then going out and changing it.

“At our core, Ottawa (like any city) is a service delivery organisation,” said Marc. “And like any service delivery organisation, we need to find a way to keep pace with changing client expectations that are driving towards more and more personalised, customised, and in-context service experiences. In order to be able to keep up with that pace of change, we have to extend our ability to innovate, in our organisation.”

With our goal of delivering exceptional client service through grassroots innovation, we needed to understand what processes, systems and cultural factors were acting as enablers of – and barriers to – this innovation ‘at the edges’. Why was innovation happening in certain pockets of the organisation, but not in others? What was making service transformation possible sometimes, but not Touchpoint 11-1 51

The Innovation Operating Model: The Three Levels

Strategic Enabling city-wide outcomes (tied to city-wide strategic planning, council direction, etc.).

Corporate Enabling organisation-wide outputs and culture change across functions and departments.

Department/Line of Service

People Culture, reward and recognition, capabilities, recruitment

Identify the need

Enabling service delivery improvements in branches/units

Processes Processes, policies

Generate Solutions

Organisation Technology Information Governance, partnerships, Platforms, integration, Communications/ roles, accountabilities, tools messages, metrics and funding, physical environment KPIs, data and analytics

Obtain approval and funding

Build and pilot solution

Iterate and assess impact

Process Digital

In order to enhance and enable innovation within the city organisation, the first step was to embed these new ways of working at every level, including staff and senior leadership. As a result, the Innovation Operating Model recognises the need for enabling factors at three levels, with recommendations for organisational (internal) enablers focused on the corporate and department/line of service levels.

always? Was there truly a recipe for success that we could formalise, replicate, and embed across the organisation?

With these questions simmering in our minds, PwC and the City of Ottawa embarked on a four-month service design journey to define a new innovation operating model. The goal of the operating model was to go beyond simply creating a ‘culture of innovation’.

The choice of an operating model was deliberate, because both the city and PwC understood that for a culture of innovation to be sustainable, innovation enablers must be defined and embedded into core operating principles, touching upon data and analytics, IT systems, governance, people skills, individual development plans and more. All the individual components of an 52 Touchpoint 11-1

operating model needed to work together to create an ecosystem of support for innovation internally.

Why service design?

Our approach leveraged some of the critical tools of service design, such as user research, co-creation, prototyping and user testing.

Using service design methods to develop the operating model with employees had two clear benefits. Firstly, the user-centred approach helped develop a focus on the people that are delivering the services. Secondly, engaging staff in a client-centric approach taught them

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the value of user-centricity, and how applying a client-centric mindset could support the process of grassroots innovation in their delivery of services.

“In a service delivery organisation like the City [of Ottawa], it’s two sides of the same coin. The experience of the citizen is married up with the experience of the front-line service provider – our employees,” said Marc. “That relationship is more symbiotic today than it ever has been. It’s one of the underlying transformational market forces that is impacting service delivery today. So, for us to use a client-centric approach to innovation when we were consulting with employees was critical.”

Demonstration of the dual value of the process also came directly from employees. After one of our operating model testing sessions with employees, a city staff member provided feedback on the value of the model itself and the education in a user-centred approach, and said, “… with a formal innovation process and model … the biggest impact is listening to our clients to guide our thinking.” This change in mindset was a critical outcome for the project, and one the city continues to strengthen and scale.

Consistently bringing innovation into the organisation, across every department In order to create a new operating model that was relevant and actionable, we knew we needed to start by understanding what changes might be required to the current model in order to scale the new ap­proach organisation-wide.

When it came to innovation, we knew that Ottawa was not starting from scratch. There were already pockets of staff developing ad hoc innovative solutions to client needs, with several great examples in existence. The goal was to learn from these pioneer innovators.

In a series of co-creation sessions with frontline employees across different lines of service, departments, and functional roles – all identified as grassroots innovators – we sought to understand their approaches to service innovation, what sup-

ported their process, what acted as significant barriers they needed to overcome, and how they tackled those barriers. Through these co-creation workshops, we aimed to learn the ‘secret sauce’ of innovation from those who had already been successful in building, piloting and launching new service transformation initiatives.

We learned that, like in many organisations, the most commonly-cited barriers had to do with working in operating silos, cultural aversion to risk and a lack of dedicated time to commit to innovation efforts. What employees cited as the most common enablers of innovation were support at the leadership level, access to collaborative partners (both inside and outside the organisation), access to and availability of technology to support their innovations, and having dedicated time to commit to innovation efforts.

As we considered how to embed support for service innovation into the operating model, we knew that it would need to both address these critical challenges and amplify the factors that contribute to success.

We identified two critical levels of the oper­ ating model for embedding support across the organisation. At the corporate level, we identified the right cultural and organisational conditions to enable and support innovation, within functions such as human resources, procurement, IT, etc. We then worked with the city to identify initiatives under five capabilities: People, Process, Organisation, Information and Technology.

Secondly, at the department/line of service level, which is where the process of service innovation happens ‘at the edges’ within actual service delivery, we identified key initiatives (both process-related and digital-related) that will embed innovation supports within the five steps of the city’s standard model of service delivery.

In total, we developed 85 unique and actionable recommendations to deliver improved services.

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User research

How we used it

What we learned

We conducted interviews, group discussions, and research labs with corporate employees, senior leaders and front-line staff to understand the current barriers and enablers to innovation at the city.

There is nothing more valuable than inputs directly from the user!

Partway through the project we identified the need to gain more input from senior leaders as key users and enablers of the corporate level of the operating model. As a result, we modified our research approach and built in additional working sessions with leaders to learn from their thoughts and perspectives.

With front-line staff, we used journey mapping templates to better understand the individual journeys they had each had in their past pursuits of innovation, and had them identify their own biggest pain points and moments of delight.

Cocreation

We conducted a series of cocreation sessions with front-line staff and external city partners to create a future state definition of what innovation at the city should mean, and what it should look like.

We used generative brainstorming activities and discussions to articulate what the desired future state would entail, what desired outcomes of innovation would include, and how the city would support and enable innovation.

Prototyping

Between the first draft of the operating model and the final recommendation, we went through multiple iterations of the prototype.

We prototyped and evolved the content, the structure, the visualisations and individual component parts as we gathered more insights and perspectives.

User testing

We identified a specific use case to use as a testing ground for the operating model prototype. In this case, we looked at how the city could innovate in the area of mobilising volunteers during an emergency response (something that was topical and top of mind after a recent tornado).

We gathered a group of emergency and volunteer subject matter specialists for a half-day workshop to generate innovative ideas while testing the recommendations in the operating model.

54 Touchpoint 11-1

In service design, co-creation is king! Our most valuable and richest insights for the operating model came from the cocreation sessions. In fact, many of the ideas generated in these sessions made it directly into the final recommendations.

Our only learning here is where time and budget allow, we’d look for more opportunities for co-creation. In fact, the co-creation session with external partners was added later in the process because we identified that many of the key innovation enablers that employees cited relied on the ability to partner more easily with external providers.

Prototyping is incredibly valuable when it comes to articulating complex concepts – especially for something as abstract as an operating model. It was really useful for the PwC and city teams to get concepts on paper and start socialising those concepts within the team and with user audiences.

Our key learning in the prototyping process was that we should have started it even earlier. We built our first prototype after the research and co-creation sessions were completed, but we could have built it earlier in the research process once we had only a few inputs. An earlier prototype (though much lower fidelity) would have allowed is to use it as a co-creation tool, moving to more concrete feedback from users earlier.

While user testing creates significant value in the process, and identifies opportunities to iterate solutions, it can be difficult to test abstract concepts such as an operating model.

The testing method we used was an out-of-context workshop environment because many of the operating model recommendations were not yet implemented (or not yet possible to implement) at the time of testing. Some of the recommendations required stretching significantly beyond what was possible in the current operating model, and required participants to ‘pretend’ and hypothesise about what the impact of the recommendations might be.

While we were able to get valuable feedback on some pieces of the operating model, some recommendations were too abstract to resonate in a half-day workshop environment. In the future we would explore the possibility of breaking out pieces of the operating model, and applying different, more focused testing methods depending on the content of the recommendations.

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What we learned applying service design tools to a ‘meta’ problem Our approach leveraged some of the critical tools of service design, such as user research, co-creation, prototyping and user testing. We quickly realised that the questions we were wrestling with were much bigger than, “How do we deliver this service in a better, more innovative way”? Instead, we were looking at a more substantive question: “How might we, as an organisation, design an innovation model for how we enable innovative service delivery across all our services?”

With flexible tools, we could adapt and adjust throughout the process to get to the answers we were seeking.

At the corporate level, the operating model recommendations included things such as: People – Creating a rotating innovation team, de­ — ployed in an ad hoc manner, to provide rele­vant skills, specialised resources and expertise to innovation teams, to accelerate innovation initiatives.

Processes – Expanding the implementation — of innovation requirements for large-scale, long- term contracts with core vendors.

— Organisation – Leverage the ecosystem (including higher education, civic tech groups, third party developers, etc.) on innovation projects, to bring the outside in.

— Information – Promoting internal and external development of APIs and open data sets to foster innovation with third party developers.

Technology – Implementing a client hub to drive client — insights and deliver a unified client experience.

What next?

What’s most exciting about this work is that the development of the operating model was truly just the starting point. While it’s only been five months since the recommendations were finalised, the city has already begun to implement key pieces of the operating model by integrating the recommendations into the city-wide transformation roadmap for the next four year term of council (2019 to 2022).

In conversation with Marc René de Cotret, he identified the importance of moving beyond the operating model itself and into the implementation and rollout stage, saying that the city is “… moving forward with integrating the recommendations into the way we operate.”

The degree and speed at which the recommendations were accepted and adopted is a testament to the city’s commitment to supporting service innovation, but also to the manner in which the team worked.

As in any great service design engagement, the best solutions are ones that are co-created and tested with multiple stakeholders. The final operating model recommendations were the result of consultations with front-line and administrative employees, external partners and a blended core team of City of Ottawa and PwC staff, working towards a shared goal: to prove that service delivery innovation is more than possible in a public sector environment.

At the department/line of service level, the operating model included recommendations such as: — Establishing client experience data collection by service classification to support decision making and continuous improvement.

Embeding components of an agile methodology — into pilots and scaling iteratively.

Providing training to select staff on core new — technology platforms embedded in innovation ecosystem to understand ‘the art of the possible’.

Expanding the public engagement capability to — engage citizens earlier in the innovation process.

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Tools and Methods

Using Service Design in Start-ups Learning from SMEs This article explores how start-ups can learn from small organi­ sations’ curiosity for – and implementation of – service design as a mean for innovation. By translating learnings from SMEs, we propose how start-ups can successfully adopt and practice a decentralised, informal and flexible use of service design.

Cathrine Seidelin is an Industrial PhD student at the IT University of Copenhagen and the Education Secretariat for Industry (Denmark). Her research aims to develop codesign methods to support SMEs in exploring Big Data and the design of data-driven services. cfre@itu.dk

Stine Moeslund Sivertsen is in the Masters programme in Organisational Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Copenhagen Business School. She is a part-time student worker at the Education Secretariat for Industry (Denmark). Her research investigates how organisations can unfold and sustain their transformative capacities, through the use of creative working methods. stms@iu.dk

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Translating a small organisation’s experiences with implementing service design into useful learnings for start-ups Service design continues to become embedded in established organisations that are looking for new ways to innovate their services. Yet, little is known about service design’s role in start-ups – newly emerged organisations that aim to develop a viable business model to address a problem or marketplace. In this article, we explore how learnings from small- to medium-sized organisations’ (SMEs) practical experiences with implementing service design as a means for innovation can be useful for startups. We argue that the challenges faced

by SMEs and start-ups share several characteristics, such as limited resources.

Our analysis draws on rich data from a larger, three-year collaborative actionresearch study, initiated in 2017 between an SME and IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The study investigates how

SMEs can use service design as a means for innovation and the design of datadriven services1 . The research is situated at the Education Secretariat for Industry, Industriens Uddannelser (henceforth IU), a small-sized service organisation based in Copenhagen.2 IU’s aim is to ensure that market needs meet market demands, as well as ensuring future-oriented and attractive education, thereby contributing to the qualification of the future workforce. Prior to this research, the organisation had no previous knowledge or experience with applying service design, making its implementation process comparable to that of typical start-ups.

1 Seidelin, C., Dittrich, Y. and Grönvall, E. (2018).

Data Work in a Knowledge-Broker Organisation: How Cross-Organisational Data Maintenance shapes Human Data Interactions. BCS Learning and Development Ltd. 2 Iu.dk. (n.d.). About us. [online] Available at: https://iu.dk/om-os/iu-organisation/about-us/ [Accessed 16. Apr. 2019].

tools and me thods

There are three main challenges we have encountered in our attempt to anchor service design as an approach to innovation at IU. We propose how these experiences can be relevant to start-ups by reflecting on our ways of dealing with these challenges.

The three challenges are: 1) an organisation’s understanding of service design, 2) the placement of service design within the organisational setting, and 3) the notion of what characterises a service design project. We investigate each of the three challenges separately, demonstrating and exemplifying through empirical observations how start-ups can make service design part of a viable business model.

Implementing service design as a means for innovation at IU The following are three key learnings – based on empirical data from our explorations – which address how to anchor service design as an approach to innovation at IU. We argue that these learnings are also applicable and useful for start-ups.

Innovation in-between The first key learning suggests that start-ups should adopt an understanding of service design as ‘innovation in-between’. This learning draws on Hargadon and Bechky’s notion of ‘Collective Creativity’3, which refers to moments of social interaction between individuals which trigger new interpretations and new discoveries that the individual would not have been able to generate alone. In line with this idea, we propose that within smaller organisations it can be beneficial not to consider service design as a skill-set anchored within an individual (e.g. a service designer), but rather manifesting as moments of innovation which emerge in-between individuals. In the following, we demonstrate how this ‘in-between’ understanding can

3 Hargadon, A. B., and Bechky, B. A. (2006) “When collections of creatives become creative collectives: a field study of problem solving at work”, Organization Science, 17(4): 484-500.

Individual knowledge-base

!"

idea

A

Realization of idea

B

Innovation dependent on service designer

idea

idea Collective knowledgebase

A

idea

AB

B

New innovative outcomes

Innovation in-between

help start-ups to deploy service design in their nascent organisations. This reflection focusses on our initial approach to anchoring service design within a SME. Initially, we provided the management team at IU with a toolbox which constituted a compendium of shorter articles about service design and examples of it ‘in use’ within the organisation. This compendium was used as a means to establish a collective understanding of service design and its potential value prior to joining Touchpoint 11-1 59

a workshop with the authors and the management team. During the workshop, the authors acted as facilitators while the management team were asked to practically apply some of the service design tools that were described in the compendium on a pressing case about the design of an internal on-boarding process for new employees. The compendium and workshop combined offered a common base of knowledge as well as practical experiences and collective insights that the group could bring back to each of their departments.

The choice of distributing a toolbox and educating the group of managers has proven to be beneficial. The combination of written material and practical experience with ‘collective creativity’ enabled participants to reflect on the use of service design in relation to other ongoing innovation projects. This initiative to anchor service design established a joint knowledge base that the managers could freely tap into, where, and apply in a way that made sense to them. Therefore, such distributed knowledge enables service design to be spread at a faster pace, more widely within the organisation.

Today, a dominant narrative in start-ups is that of the ‘entrepreneurial hero’ – a person that develops and leads all innovative proposals and processes.

Based on the abovementioned reflections on what we saw, we propose that start-ups should instead focus on service design as innovation in-between, and on this basis establish the right conditions that enable this mentality to thrive within their organisation.

This suggests that start-ups place emphasis on the power of shared rather than individual efforts, and moving towards the idea of ‘multipreneurship’ rather than entrepreneurship. Our research shows that a shared knowledge base of service design within a small organisation constitutes a valuable first step towards creating an organisational environment that supports innovation in-between.

Decentralised approach The second key learning is that start-ups should apply a decentralised approach to the implementation of service design as a means for innovation. This refers 60 Touchpoint 11-1

Organisational structure

Centralised service design establishment

Organisational structure

Decentralised service design establishment

to ‘where’ service design is anchored within an organisation. In the context of start-ups, it might not be obvious where to implement it, as the establishment of a team or department might not be possible due to e.g. limited resources or non-settled organisational structures. We address this challenge and suggest a decentralised approach to enable the implementation of service design within a small organisation.

tools and me thods

We proposed establishing a service design team as an attempt to anchor service design within IU. We imagined that the team would include a set number of employees from different departments. This team would then get a crash-course in service design, allowing them to act as a ‘task force’ that would support other groups by suggesting how service design could be a valuable approach to a given project.

While we proposed a highly centralised way to anchor service design, the management team was very reluctant to form such a team. They were concerned scarce staff resources, and having a fixed set of internal service design ‘experts’ was perceived as an additional task, and to some extent even a ‘burden’ for individual employees.

Despite the resistance, we tried several times to get such a team in place by presenting the potential benefits by using examples from another (large) organisation that had implemented such a service design team with great success4 . Even so, we could not convince the management team, who instead suggested that we made use of a number of so-called “micro cases”, thereby decentralising the efforts of informing and ‘educating’ people through practical experience with small ongoing projects We were then given access to a list of cases, and we chose to engage with four of them. This offered us an opportunity to reach people doing different types of work, and allowed us to educate them, and test and refine our approach.

Our research shows that a decentralised approach to service design offered the opportunity for ‘small wins’ in a variety of settings within an organisation.

Offering employees a ‘free test and trial’ of service design tools and methods was perceived positively.

Moreover, it has changed the internal notion of service design from “a burden” to “a generous offering” for a larger number of employees to get a sense of the service design tools, methods and mind-set. Thus, the

4 Kolding.dk. (n.d.). Kolding.dk | Designsekretariatet. [online] Available at: https://www.kolding.dk/om-kommunen/vi-designerlivet/designsekretariatet/kolding-kommunes-designsekretariat [Accessed 16 Apr. 2019].

‘decentralised compromise’ turned out to be a meaningful and valuable approach in the context of a SME. Informal approach Our third key learning proposes that start-ups should take an ‘informal’ approach to service design to enable flexible use of its tools and methods. As the previous, second learning of the decentralisation of service design distanced itself from a formal service design team,

Process

A

B

“Formal” service design project

Process

Element

Element

A

B Element

“Informal” use of service design elements

Touchpoint 11-1 61

the informal approach distances itself from the idea of having specific, formal service design project. By ‘formal’ projects, we refer to those projects that go through a ‘perfectly’ designed process from beginning to end.

The choice of a decentralised approach meant that we needed to incorporate basic knowledge about service design into each of the chosen mini cases. One of the cases focused on a long-term, on-going project of implementing administrative robotics at IU. At the time we joined the project, the project group had already identified a long list of ideas for processes that could potentially be automated. Given that the project was already on its way, the authors needed to consider carefully what would be the most appropriate way to integrate service design in this context.

We set aside the idea of using a formal service design process and chose instead to focus on useful service design tools and methods. In the robotics case, the group needed support in identifying processes which would inform the development of the robot. We chose to introduce the project group to a key aspect of service design: visualisation. We brought together the in-house programmer and administrative staff and had them visualise the administrative processes, enabling them to gain a shared understanding of what the robot should do at any given point in the process. It also spurred an understanding of the value of their collaboration and how they could work together in new ways that could offer better outcomes than working independently. In this case, the service design elements of the visualisation enabled innovative outcomes from their collective exploration of the administrative processes.

The research shows that such an informal approach to service design offers customisation of the process, in which service design is introduced and applied to the extent it makes sense. It is therefore important to consider and articulate the relevance and usefulness of the selected elements of service design. This informal approach increases the flexibility and understanding of what it means to do service design, which can be useful for small organisations as a way to infuse service design into the organisation.

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Key learnings for start-ups We hope we have been able to translate our valuable SME experiences into useful learnings for start-ups. Our analysis led to three key conclusions: First, to understand service design as ‘innovation in-between’ shows that it does not have to be considered as a fixed skill-set anchored within an individual, but instead can take the form of social interactions among heterogeneous actors. The advancement of the understanding of service design as ‘innovation in-between’ removes the service designer as the ‘key to innovation’, and emphasises an understanding that enables service design to exist in a small organisation without a designated service designer, but instead as a fluid toolbox.

Second, rather than centralising service design within an organisation, a decentralised approach can help to pave the way for service design to get going as a means to innovation. Our study shows that a decentralised approach makes it possible for service design to thrive in the context of current infrastructure.

Finally, an informal approach enables flexible use of service design tools and methods, which refines the notion of how service design can be incorporated in projects. This kind of flexibility makes it possible for start-ups to successfully implement service design.

These conclusions are relevant both for the service designer and for start-ups, because they imply a less traditional approach on how to implement service design as a means for innovation. Our findings offer new opportunities for service design to be integrated within start-ups that might otherwise have excluded the option of applying service design in-house.

Anniversary Collection Touchpoint is already in its eleventh year of publication, having first been published in early 2009. To celebrate this significant milestone, we are happy to offer a limited Anniversary Collection pack, including 22 issues.

Take on this opportunity to fill your personal or corporate library with ten years of in-depth articles relevant to service design, written by authors from around the world!

22 copies € 330,80

€ 200 + shipping costs*

vol 10 no 1 | august 2018 | 18 € vol 10 no 2 | october 2018 | 18 €

From Design to Implementation

Designing the Future

vol 10 no 3 | april 2019 | 18 €

Managing Service Design

vol 9 no 3 | april 2018 | 18 €

vol 8 no 2 | oktober 2016 | 18 €

Service Design at Scale

thinking & doing vol 7 no 1 | april 2015

Service Design Policy

14 FroM Thinking anD Doing To Service DeSign LeaDing Brian Gillespie, Frans Joziasse 40 inFLuencing Service DeSign SucceSS Warren Duffy 72 The Service DeSign MaTuriT y MoDeL Niels Corsten, Jules Prick

44 THE FUTURE OF SERVICE DESIGN IN A POST-HUMAN WORLD Sandjar Kozubaev 60 FUTURES THINKING: A MIND-SET, NOT A METHOD Zoë Prosser, Santini Basra 70 HOW

FORESIGHT PRACTICES SUPPORT SERVICE INNOVATION Thalis Laspias

34 SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTING SERVICE DESIGN PROJECTS Tina Weisser, Wolfgang Jonas, Birgit Mager 56 IMPLEMENTATION BY DESIGN Karen Barrett, Ewan Cameron, Sam Hirsch, Martta Oliveira 68 DATA-DRIVEN SERVICE DESIGN Lassi A. Liikkanen

8 HOW TO SCALE SERVICE DESIGN Kerry Bodine 50 HOW TO CREATE 70,000 SERVICE DESIGNERS Geoffrey Lew 73 PRODUCT-SERVICE SYSTEMS Ivo Dewit

the journal of service design

Vol.10 No.3

Vol.10 No.2

Vol.10 No.1

Vol.9 No.3

16 Bridging the gap by Lynn Stott 46 Breaking the Blueprint by Chris Ferguson, Chad Story 58 Customer Journey measures by Asbjørn Følstad, Knut Kvale

the journal of service design

the journal of service design

Vol.8 No.2

18 euro

Vol.7 No.1 volume 5 | no. 2 | 15,80 euro

volume 5 | no. 1 | 15,80 euro

September 2013

May 2013

Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services

Deep Dive: Collecting Relevant Insights

Social Innovation in Local Government: Sustaining Success

The Service Design Promise

By Ben Reason

By Julie McManus and Emma Barrett

Purpose-Driven Research as Key to Successful Service Design

Public & Collaborative: Designing Services for Housing

By Stefan Moritz and Marcus Gabrielsson

By Chelsea Mauldina and Eduardo Staszowski

When Design and Market Researchers Join Forces

Are Free Public Libraries Still Needed?

By Remko van der Lugt and Gerrita van der Veen

By Mikko Mäkinen and Richard Stanley

Vol.6 No.3

Vol.6 No.2

Vol.6 No.1

Vol.5 No.3

Vol.5 No.2

Vol.5 No.1

Vol.4 No.3

Vol.4 No.2

Vol.4 No.3

Vol.3 No.3

Vol.3 No.2

Vol.3 No.1

Vol.2 No.3

Vol.2 No.2

Vol.2 No.1

Vol.1 No.3

The Anniversary Collection pack includes 22 issues for the special discounted price of € 200 plus shipping costs (*EU € 24,50 / Rest of the world € 49,00). Please note: issues not inclu­ded in this pack are sold out and can be purchased in digital format at our website: Vol.1 No.1, Vol.1 No.2, Vol.7 No.2, Vol.7 No.3, Vol.8 No.1, Vol.8 No.3, Vol.9 No.1, Vol.9 No.2.

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The AI Design Sprint Empowering participants to embrace the potential of high-tech

Technology advances at breath-taking speed. Developing new solutions – or improving existing ones – while at the same time keeping track of these advances and considering opportunities they introduce, becomes increasingly challenging for us service designers. Therefore, we need to find ways to Jonas Wenke is co-founder of 33A, an AI design company.

He has worked in diverse companies, from big corpora­ tions to start-ups, and also as a freelancer, before co-founding 33A. His passion lays in empowering people to take ownership and start applying AI in their businesses. jonas@33a.ai

64 Touchpoint 11-1

understand their potential, while at the same time enabling stakeholders to have an informed role in the process. One way to do this for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ‘AI Design Sprint’, a fast, paper-based and hands-on co-creation format.

Artificial Intelligence: The fuzzy buzzword The growing impact of AI is sparking more and more interest. When Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai says, “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I don’t know, electricity or fire,” or when Andrew Ng, former Baidu Chief Scientist and Stanford Adjunct Professor, describes AI as “the new electricity” – meaning it will transform every industry – they understandably draw considerable attention. Logical follow-up questions include: “Why is this AI thing expected to have such tremendous impact?”, and, “What exactly is AI anyway?”.

Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term for multiple technologies. Because the technology is itself intangible,

interactions with AI-based solutions are often not recognised as such by the person using the service. The broadness of the term, and the ‘invisible’ nature of the technology itself, can make it tough to grasp and communicate.

A useful definition for designers If you search for a definition of AI, you will find many. Rather than deny you the experience of discovering these yourself, I will share the definition we use in our AI Design Sprints, which is a mix of different, frequently used ones: “Artificial Intelligence is a branch of computer science that deals with the imitation of intelligent (human) behaviour.”1 But what does that mean? The definition continues: “AI enables machines to perform tasks which normally require

tools and me thods

Impression of an AI Design Sprint Core Session

Communicating the capabilities and broad application potential of AI using cards

human intelligence (e.g. visual perception, or speech recognition)”.2 The need for more service design for AI-based solutions Imagine an AI solution provider which has identified and focusses on particular use cases. These effectively become the ‘menu’ to choose from for the client. This is, however, a very technology- and business-driven way of approaching an AI project. The solution space is limited by the specific focus of the AI solution provider. There is, of course, value to be gained using this approach, especially when addressing repetitive, standard use cases. However, as a service designer, I believe in human-centred design processes; first identifying pain-points, needs and wants, before investigating the potential of the technology in helping address them.

There are also other current ways of starting AI projects. One way is having designers familiar with

1 Marr, B. (2018). The Key Definitions Of Artificial Intelligence (AI) That Explain Its Importance, Forbes www.forbes.com/sites/ bernardmarr/2018/02/14/the-key-definitions-of-artificialintelligence-ai-that-explain-its-importance/#3b1b313c4f5d 2 ibid.

the capabilities of AI follow or shadow the people they are designing for, and deriving concepts based on their observations. Another one is conducting design sprints and adding an AI expert to the team.

Why do we need another way of starting AI projects?

There is not a single perfect design for a given service.

It can take many forms and the quality of the outcome is reliant upon multiple factors, such as the quality of the research that was conducted. The solution should, however, represent a negotiation between the interests of all relevant stakeholders. Therefore, there is a need for a collaborative method to understand the opportunities and discuss and create solution concepts. Co-creation methods are well known and work very well in the right context. However, the significant potential of a rapidly-developing and evolving technology such as AI presents a challenge. It is increasingly difficult for us service designers, who often find ourselves facilitating such workshops (as well as those for IoT and blockchain, among others) to adequately help participants navigate the broad application capabilities of these technologies.

So, in order to truly co-create, and not solely rely on an AI expert’s specific capabilities, we need Touchpoint 11-1 65

Presession

AI-design sprint core session

Technical check

Expert recommendation

Different sessions of the AI Design Sprint

workshop participants to be able to take control.

This requires that they know the abilities of the technology, as well as different ways it can be applied. While this does not fully replace the need for an AI expert, it reshapes that person’s role.

The different sessions of an AI Design Sprint Instead of dedicating an entire week for the whole team, we took apart, reassembled and stripped-down elements of the design sprint method as much as possible. The AI Design Sprint consists of the following sessions:

The AI Design Sprint The AI Design Sprint is a fast, hands-on way of developing AI-based solution concepts as a team. It is derived from the design sprint method (as described in Sprint by Jake Knapp) and uses a card deck to educate participants about the capabilities of AI. I find sprints and other co-creative formats especially valuable at the beginning of a design process, to quickly align as a team, explore potentials, and clearly define direction, as expressed in the first solution concepts and prototypes. In this regard, the AI Design Sprint is no exception.

The ‘Pre-Session’, in which the scope for the ‘AI Design — Sprint Core Session’ is defined, together with decision makers of the client company. Afterwards, all relevant data is gathered to prepare for the next step.

— The ‘AI Design Sprint Core Session’, in which the teams develop AI-based solution concepts, and then discuss and prioritise these with input from an AI expert.

— The ‘Technical Check’, in which the AI expert more thoroughly evaluates the technical feasibility of the developed solution concepts, together with the client’s IT department.

— The ‘AI Expert Recommendation’ presentation, which consists of a recap of the process, a presentation of the results of the ‘Technical Check’, as well as recommendations on how to proceed. This consists of a potential roadmap and early cost estimates.

Communicating the capabilities of AI The necessary knowledge about AI, and more specifically the information about how it can be applied, comes in the shape of the ‘AI Card Deck’. This deck comprises 52 cards, organised in different categories. This is similar to other card decks that communicate the potential of technology, such as the “Method Kit with Tech Building Blocks”. They both create a common understanding of a given technology and are useful in framing discussions.

One of the ways teams can use the cards is to apply sorting methods to prioritise relevant technologies.

66 Touchpoint 11-1

Different versions for different aims There is not just one ‘AI Design Sprint’, but different versions. Here is a list of the typical versions we facilitate: — An ‘AI Design Sprint Opportunity Mapping’ version, which starts with an organisational overview of the client company, and aims to communicate the broad application potential for AI, while also identifying and prioritising specific

tools and me thods

What to focus on?

AI opportunity mapping

Product

New products & services development

?

Product & service improvement

Evaluation canvas

6. Evaluation

Ai-Design Sprint canvas new products & services

5. Solution

Process

Process automation in core business

4. User test Different versions of the AI Design Sprint

opportunity areas throughout the organisation.

An ‘AI Design Sprint New Products and Services’ — version, which most closely resembles the original design sprint. It starts with a user or customer, identifies their needs and wants (based on research), and then builds on these, with participants creating new AI-based solution concepts.

— An ‘AI Design Sprint Product Improvement’ version, which starts with a customer journey map, and the identification of pain points and opportunities, and then has participants explore the potential of AI to improve the customer experience across steps in the journey.

— An ‘AI Design Sprint Process Automation’ version, which resembles the ‘AI Design Sprint Product Improvement’ version but starts instead with a process map rather than a customer journey.

3. AI technology

2. Needs and wants

1. Person

The AI Design Sprint Core Session Let's have a look at the ‘AI Design Sprint Core Session’ using the ‘AI Design Sprint New Products and Services’ version as an example. Here, the group of participants is split up into teams of four to five people. Each team works on one canvas, which shows the phases and describes

Different phases of the ‘AI Design Sprint New Products and Services’

Touchpoint 11-1 67

Simple solution concept example within the 'AI Design Sprint Core Session'

the steps to take along the way. The teams stands at one end of the table and works their way towards the solution at the other end of the canvas, giving them a feeling of control. In addition, we use a presentation to facilitate the sprint, providing examples along the way, and we also monitor the time for individual tasks.

The session is structured into six different phases: 1. Person: The person, or persona, is based on research

and is prepared prior to the session. The team’s task is to familiarise themselves with the persona.

2. Needs and Wants: The team identifies a persona’s specific ‘need’ or ‘want’ that they want to design a solution for. These are partly based on research, but the participants have the opportunity to add to them during the session. This phase consists of different card sorting exercises, first done individually and then done collaboratively. It is designed to 68 Touchpoint 11-1

involve every team-member while making it as easy as possible to quickly make decisions.

3. A I Technology: In this phase, the participants match the chosen need or want with the AI Card Deck. Similar to the ‘Needs and Wants’ phase, this is first done individually and then in collaborative card-sorting exercises. Based on the three most important AI Cards, the participants individually formulate simple sentences describing concepts to address the chosen need or want. Afterwards, the team aligns on one concept to further define in the next steps. This phase is the heart of the AI Design Sprint and is similar across all different versions.

The AI Card Deck can for example also be matched with a customer journey step or process step.

4. User Test: The purpose of this section of the canvas is to create a sheet to present the solution to a user, or at least to somebody outside of the team, to get

tools and me thods

some very initial feedback. Before doing so, the teams visualise their solution in a simple journey and iterate their concept description. Then they complete this presentation sheet by restating the person they are designing for, the selected need or want, and the AI Technology that forms the basis of the concept.

5. Solution: After receiving feedback, the teams incorporate it while iterating their solution concept. They fill in the solution sheet, which is very similar to the one from the ‘User Test’ phase, and give their solution concept a catchy name.

This is the final concept for this point in time.

6. Evaluation: This part takes place on its own canvas. The solution concepts are evaluated by the individual teams from different angles: 1. Evaluating the value for the person, visualising

what the life of the person could look like with the realised solution, and evaluating how valuable this would actually be for the person.

2. Assessing the technical feasibility of the specific concept with the support of the AI expert. The team investigates what data the solution requires as well as this data’s form and accessibility for the company. Afterwards, based on examples and with the help of the AI expert, the teams roughly estimate the complexity of their solutions.

3. Evaluating the business viability of the solution concept. The team evaluates what key resources are required, if new revenue streams are created, and to which extent the solution is aligned with the organisation’s goals and values.

concepts are available, along with their first evaluations.

The teams present and discuss these and involve the AI expert as well.

Outcomes of the AI Design Sprint process The main outcomes are: — AI-based solution concepts prioritised according to desirability, feasibility and viability Strong ownership of concepts by the participants — Participants are better informed and more — knowledgeable about the capabilities of AI All of these outcomes help to carry initial ideas further, such as when it comes to ‘selling’ an idea within the organisation, and once the detailed design and realisation activities start. In the end, the AI Design Sprint is a format-first discussion and co-creation method, which enables a kick-start to the journey of creating new AI-based services.

To learn more, you may reach the author by email.

In addition, resources are available at www.33A.ai.

The evaluation sheet ends with a summarisation section, in which the value for the person, technical feasibility and business viability are assessed on a scale. All the solution sheets and evaluation summaries are cut out and hung on the wall. Then the teams present their solution concepts and evaluations. What follows is a discussion of the different concepts, including feedback from the AI expert.

At the end of such a session, a couple of relevant Touchpoint 11-1 69

Conscious Design: A Practitioner’s Mindset Every day, we are confronted with the inevitability of an ecological apocalypse. “No one is coming to save us,” writes the Guardian newspaper in London. There’s no Planet B. Despite this, our dayto-day work in service design may not always consider its impact on society and the environment. Can design contribute towards Karwai Ng is a Digital Anthropology MSc student at UCL. Previously she was a Service Design Manager at HSBC’s PayMe, Hong Kong’s payments app with over 1.5 million users. Karwai and Will shared their journey at SXSW, Google’s Sprint Conference and Interaction Design Week.

She hopes to change how we design, one iceberg at a time. karwai52@gmail.com

Will Anderson is the Experience Strategy Lead at Publicis Emil Region Europe.

He enjoys experimenting with the design process and thinking about the wider context of designing interactions, services and products that go beyond benefits to the individual and more to the collective benefit of people. wand3e@gmail.com

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sustainable futures?

In 2017, Will and I coined the term ‘conscious design’ in an attempt to shift designers’ mindsets from focussing only on the individual to focussing on our society and the environment. At the time, we observed that companies seemed to be adopting a cookie cutter approach to design, resulting in experiences that felt oddly similar. Services such as Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo, Airbnb, and others were so well designed for certain user expectations (simplicity, transparency, on-demand service) that we have adopted them without much active consideration.

Yet the risk here is we stop reflecting on what’s meaningful for people versus what is prescribed by tech firms. We’ve become so obsessed with making digital products and services frictionless, streamlined and personalised that we almost forget to question – to stop and reflect on what really matters to us. Do we really need another ride-sharing app? Another

grocery delivery app? More offices being leased out as co-working spaces?

Our predilection for all things ‘tech’ risks us finding ourselves in an ever more insular world analogous to a so-called ‘Plato’s Cave’, in which tech giants cast the shadows we see and experience every day, and which we take for reality.1 As designers, we have also contributed to designing digital copycats that have largely focussed on the self. As Will reflected then: “Are the experiences we design so ‘user’- rather than ‘people’-focused that we’re actually fuelling a sense of self-centredness and

1 Plato’s Allegory of the Cave describes a group of prisoners who have been chained to the floor all of their lives, facing a blank wall. On the raised walkway behind these prisoners, puppeteers use objects to cast shadows against the wall.

Over time, these shadows become the prisoners’ reality. The prisoners give names to them, un­ aware of the fact that they are shadows and of a world outside of the cave.

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perpetuating an image of a world revolving around you?”

In a world of digital copycats, is there a way out?

Conscious design We believe conscious design could provide a way.

Conscious design can be defined as an awareness of the potential long-term and unintended consequences of what we design, as well as a continuous experimenta­ tion of our design process to build more sustainable products and services. It involves looking below the ‘tip of the iceberg’ to uncover hidden ramifications and unintended consequences behind our design deci­ sions. We see conscious design as a first step towards building circular economies and transition design.2 The Will-Wai Experiment Conscious design has its origins in an experiment we ran in the summer of 2016, where we tackled different areas of our design process, looking at research, ideation and value propositions in an attempt to evolve the design process and battle digital copycats.

We ran workshops in the Publicis Sapient (formerly SapientNitro) London office, inviting colleagues from research, strategy, design, copywriting, client services and technology to participate. These workshops were significant for us because they cemented the importance of ‘experimenting’ as a tenet of conscious design.

The format of the workshops was quite similar: intro­duce the topic (e.g. ideation), brainstorm what prob­ lem(s) it was potentially creating (e.g. ideas fatigue) within our design process, and collectively try out new methods to uncover novel ways of thinking and doing.

In our ideation workshop for instance, we introduced

2 “Transition Design is a proposition for a new era of design practice, study and research that advocates design-led societal transitions toward more sustainable futures. Transition design solutions have their origins in long-term thinking, are lifestyle oriented and placebased and always acknowledge the natural world as the greater context for all design solutions.” – Irwin, Terry. 2015. “Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Era of Design Practice, Study and Research.” Unpublished manuscript, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University.

Fig. 1 and 2: Bringing together different agency members in our best-in-class research and ideation workshops at the London office to debate and experiment with new ways of working

improvisation rules to see if we could break free from generic, Post-it perfect thinking. Although the ideas were quite outlandish, we realised one important thing: Improv injected a visceral feeling that was missing from today’s design practice. None of us could quite anticipate our reactions beforehand, as we were forced to build on each other’s improvisations on the spot.

This sensation of discomfort became relevant later on, when we formed our first conscious design principles.

The beginnings of conscious design As we began to prepare for our last workshop on values, we came to a realisation: We seemed to be only addressing the tip of the iceberg when completing standard value proposition exercises.

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71

service Deliveroo View of the world

By only looking at customers’ needs and product/ service benefits, we failed to plan for and anticipate unin­tended consequences, as well as take into account the needs of other service actors, and society at large. Standard applications of Design Thinking did not seem to take into consideration these wider ‘below the iceberg’ forces.

One of the first examples we used to overlay what we later termed ‘below the iceberg thinking’ was on Facebook’s ‘Trending Topics’ – a shortlist of trending headlines among the site’s users at the time.

A standard value proposition exercise would conclude that ‘Trending Topics’ addressed customers’ ‘wants’ of consuming real-time, bite-sized news as its core value proposition. But it omitted far more sinister aspects, such as whether Facebook’s product designers were (un)consciously limiting people’s attention spans when confronted with clickbait headlines or reducing people’s tendencies to critically analyse what they were consuming. These discussions took place before the media’s focus on fake news and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and they felt very significant. This was how ‘below the iceberg thinking’ first came about.

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Below the iceberg:

Implications

Impact

Invisible unseen

- The invisible / unseen - Unintended consequences

Unintended consequences

- Context (inflection points)

Wider context

Rest of the world

Fig. 4: A visualisation of ‘below the ice­berg thinking’ The Iceberg Canvas

Product and service

Customer

Fig. 5: The Iceberg Canvas helps us visualise what sits above and below the tip of the iceberg

Credit: Will Anderson and Karwai Ng. This work is liscened under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Liscense.

Fig. 3: An example of overlaying ‘below the iceberg’ sticky notes on a standard Value Proposition Canvas for the food delivery

tools and me thods

Below the iceberg thinking Conscious design is underpinned by what we term ‘below the iceberg thinking’ (see Fig. 3), which involves looking below the tip of the iceberg (the user and the business) to consider the wider stakeholders of a product or service, e.g. service actors delivering the service, as well as our society and environment. It asks us to consider both the positive and negative ramifications of our design decisions, as well their potential unintended consequences. It’s a challenge to current applications of Design Thinking that only focus on the lens of the customer and the business, and it forces us to ask ourselves, “What is the long-term and hidden impact of a feature, product or service, or entire business model?”

Applying conscious design Since our experiment in 2016, we have experimented with different applications of conscious design with businesses around the world.

Here are three different ways we have applied conscious design.

1. The Iceberg Canvas The Iceberg Canvas was the first framework we developed as part of conscious design (see Fig. 5).

The canvas builds on a traditional Value Proposition Canvas to include wider, ‘below the iceberg’ ramifications. It is a multi-step process that involves filling in a standard Value Proposition Canvas using one colour of sticky note, and then ‘flipping’ each ‘above the iceberg’ sticky note into its ‘below the iceberg’ counterpart, using different coloured sticky notes. The latter represent the individual and outcomes from a STEEP analysis.3 In Fig. 3, you can see how different a ‘below the iceberg’ view is. For example, if a customer’s need for a food delivery app is ‘food’ or ‘food now’, a below the iceberg ramification on an individual level may be that people start treating food as something that just comes to them. If the food delivery doesn’t arrive on time, the customer may automatically blame the rider. On a societal level, food delivery services may be reinforcing a racial and/or economic divide between riders and customers, because riders’ roles are simply reduced to delivering

3 STEEP stands for Sociological, Technological, Economical, Environmental and Political.

food. Finally, on an environmental level, food delivery apps may be contributing to increased street congestion and food/packaging waste.

However, aspects below the iceberg are not always negative. For instance, food delivery apps could free up people’s time to do other things or introduce people to new cuisines.

After uncovering potential below the iceberg ramifications, we then bring in the Iceberg Canvas for synthesis, where we transfer the most pertinent sticky notes from the Value Proposition Canvas onto their respective quadrants on the Iceberg Canvas and group them into themes (see Fig. 6).

Identifying below the iceberg ramifications can help companies differentiate themselves in a sea of digital copycats, and stand out for increasingly environmentally-conscious, discerning customers.

Over the last few years, we have tested the canvas with students and design professionals around the world, including at Publicis Sapient in London and Berlin, Google in San Francisco, PayMe at HSBC in Hong Kong, and with GovTech in Singapore. Since then, the Google Sprint Academy in San Francisco has run conscious design workshops with Google Shopping Express and Area 120 (their internal incubator) and has incorporated it as part of their Design Sprint Kit. SpiNovation Labs have also applied it with a music blockchain company in Toronto.

“I found this exercise very eye-opening in terms of how problem solving can lead to catastrophic

The Iceberg Canvas Speedy delivery

Tasty food now

Product and Service

Strengthen people’s relationship with riders and restaurants

Customer

Minimise waste - socially

Will Anderson and Karwai Ng. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Fig. 6: The themes on the tip of the iceberg (in yellow) reveal our digital copycats – this is what Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Seamless in New York all provide – whereas those below (in green) have traditionally been neglected by food delivery companies

Touchpoint 11-1 73

consequences. I felt compelled to further investigate the rational decisions and inspired to drive change through my everyday design decisions,” said Felipe Minella, a design director in Seattle.

2. Conscious design as a plug-in In 2017, I introduced conscious design to a Hong Kongbased global client. We used conscious design to critique their ideas around an e-commerce service they were planning to launch. To do this, we flipped each item on a customer journey to its ‘below the iceberg’ counterpart and placed these insights on two rows labelled as ‘customer’ and ‘organisation’ on a service blueprint (see Fig. 7). The results were fascinating.

We discovered that the e-commerce site’s ‘48 hours delivery’ proposition could potentially create high turnover amongst the front-line staff. This was because theirs was a global business in which time zones and geographic location mattered – i.e. where an order was placed, and where the service would be executed – and the client hadn’t completely planned for how launching a new digital service would affect their business operationally and globally.

Similarly, because the service was targeted towards SMEs, we discovered that the business had not foreseen how they would manage expectations among their larger customers – all of whom were still relying on manual methods for placing orders.

In this case, integrating conscious design into our design process helped uncover crucial insights about neglected actors affected by the new service. Moreover, it placed my project team and clients on the same page – we were liberated to critique. Ideas that my clients had

previously been passionate about were now laid out to be scrutinised. Here, conscious design became a check-and-­ balance for launching a new service for a traditionally non-design-led organisation.

More recently, I applied conscious design with data scientists and product managers to a new feature we were developing at HSBC’s PayMe, Hong Kong’s leading peerto-peer payments app.

The exercise revealed conflicts we had not foreseen, such as whether we were at risk of contributing to a homogenous society of discounts by surfacing offers on the app, which could be disadvantageous to SMEs. Moreover, it shed light on the potential mid- to long-term impacts we would have on society.

What became clear as we conducted these exercises was the importance of i) gathering a diverse group of stakeholders; ii) deriving immediate actions (e.g. ideation on a below the iceberg theme); and (iii) conducting this regularly to differentiate our product and thinking.

3. Conscious design principles Finally, we summarised the lessons learned from the ­Will-Wai experiment and conscious design into seven design principles.

1. Look beyond the customer – What lies beneath the tip of the iceberg maintains the equilibrium and keeps it afloat. We must look beyond the customer to consider wider stakeholders of a service – e.g. other service actors, our society and the environment – to ensure we don't destabilise the ecosystem they are engaged in. When there is an imbalance and the equilibrium is broken, the iceberg flips. Businesses should anticipate which below the iceberg elements have the potential to tilt or flip an organisation.

2. Be conscious and prepared – To be responsible designers in today's world, we must rigorously investigate the possible effects of our decisions.

What happens when we succeed? What happens when we scale? What happens when we scale beyond any reasonable expectation?

We need to take responsibility for our design choices and forecast potential outcomes.

Fig. 7: Applying ‘below the iceberg’ observations onto a service blueprint

74 Touchpoint 11-1

tools and me thods

3. Feel uncomfortable – Discomfort helps trigger different perspectives. It allows us to question the biases and preconceptions that limit our understanding. We must embrace discomfort as a driver of humility in design, allowing us to enter unexpected territories when generating ideas.

4. Forget best-in-class – Believe in better, not ‘best’. ‘Best-in-class’ research focuses on what's ‘good’ today instead of what's sustainable for the future. We must take a broader reference for considering what’s ‘best’ – and for whom – and design new products and services within the context of wider sociological and environmental problems.

5. Design tools rust – When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Any practice is at risk of fatigue, and ours is no different. We challenge ourselves to remain obsessed with conscious design as a mindset, and not to become obsessed with a canvas or a method. Design tools gather rust too. To innovate, kill rusty design tools and don't be afraid to invent new ones.

Conclusion In our pursuit of delivering frictionless end experiences for the user, we have lost sense of the wider, intercon­nected and diverse ecosystem we belong to. Conscious design is not a criticism of Design Thinking per se, but only in how it’s often applied in isolation from the complex ecosystems we are a part of. The outputs of user-centred design are self-evident; they’ve focussed on amassing likes, posting selfies and gaining ever-higher step counts – all amidst a backdrop of endless growth and productivity. But at what cost to our planet, and the future of mankind?

As Kari-Hans Kommonen, a theorist at the Aalto University Media Lab in Helsinki states, “doing digital design also means changing society, and designers ought to take a stand as a driver of social change”. As designers, we need to embody a critical awareness and consciousness that “digital products also live in the social world and change it”.4 Conscious design is a first step towards building more sustainable futures. We encourage you to embrace its principles. Look beyond the user, embrace discomfort, and continuously experiment to inject a sharper consciousness of how we make the world, and how the world makes us.

4 Kommonen, Kari-Hans. N.d. “In Search of Digital Design.” Unpublished manuscript, Media Lab, Aalto University, Helsinki. Courtesy

6. Experiment with the process – Experiment within your remit. Find ways to seed conscious design in your environment. Gain inspiration from different disciplines – from history to science – to add rigour to your thinking and experiment with new ways of working.

Document your experiments to understand and measure progress, or your lack thereof.

You can learn more about conscious design and how to use the Iceberg Canvas on the authors’ Medium page: https://medium.com/@willwai.

7. Challenge thinking together – A good partner stretches and elevates your thinking.

Find your partner, support as well as push each other and enjoy the journey.

Touchpoint 11-1 75

“Create a Home”: The Impact of Service Design on Start-ups A team of students within the service design Masters degree programme at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) were interested in the awareness and knowledge of service design amongst participants of a start-up competition and carried out research and identified potential areas of improvement.

Brittany Merkle (RN) is an MFA Service Design candidate at the Savannah College of Art and Design and has a BSc in nursing with distinction from the University of Virginia. nurseatscad@gmail.com Tucker Witter is an MFA Service Design candidate at the Savannah College of Art and Design and has a BSc in rehabilitation science from the University of Pittsburgh. tuckerwitter@gmail.com Peng Hsuan (Oscar) Liaw is an MFA Service Design candidate at the Savannah College of Art and Design and has a BFA in industrial design. oscar1991921@gmail.com Contributor: Matias Rey

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One-week start-up competition as the research context Each year, the SCAD User Experience club holds a start-up competition over the course of one week. Students from various degree programmes form teams to develop a product or service around a given design theme. For the Winter 2019 edition, teams explored, researched and ideated on the theme ‘Create a Home’ in order to develop a final business proposal. A total of 47 teams participated, with nine teams selected as finalists.

Day 1 of the competition began with a kick-off event in which teams were given an overview of the competition as well as suggested resources for preliminary research. Teams met and discussed research findings in preparation for an optional mentor review session on Day 4. Mentors were either subject matter experts, industry professionals or educators. Based on mentor feedback, teams iterated for their final proposal on Day 7.

On the final day, the selected nine teams

each had five minutes to present their final deliverables to a panel of judges.

Setting the theme Prior to the competition start date, the service design students investigated the theme by testing memory basins through word associations. They asked 140 individuals what were the first five words that came to their mind when they thought of ‘home,’ and respondents answered ‘family’ (n=38), ‘love’ (n=13) and ‘comfort’ (n=11). During a second iteration, the respondents were asked for the first five words that came to their mind when presented with the words ‘family,’ ‘love,’ or ‘comfort.’ These findings were compiled into a report and made accessible to the start-up teams prior to the kick-off.

Research process and findings In a mixed methods approach, the ser­v ice design students conducted six team interviews and released a survey to understand start-up team dynamics and methodolo-

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

10

Comfort

20 13

Connection

Support

11

Pets

6

11

Home

Safe Happiness

9

Trust

6 Care

12

Warm

Furniture

Food

23

38

Cozy Virtues

13 Friends

Relationship

Compromise

Color 3

75 6

4

8

Family 4 15

2

5 9 4

18

6 6 3 22

3 3 4

7

4

Love

2

‘Home’ word association report

gies used during the competition. Interviews were conducted with at least one team member and were audio transcribed. During the interviews, the participant(s) was/were asked a set of questions about the overall team process and with the use of a cultural probe, participants outlined major milestones throughout the week.

Throughout the interviews, the researchers looked for evidence of service design knowledge and/or tools.

Overall, the teams followed similar patterns of alternating between research (including primary and secondary) and various ideation techniques. Most teams mentioned the significance of mentor feedback on Day 3 of the competition. Some participants noted that this feedback prompted their team to change direction. For example, one team transitioned from a product-based to service-based deliverable due to financial constraints on the business model. None

of the teams spontaneously mentioned ‘service design’ or the word association report. Due to the time constraints of the competition, the researchers found that participating teams emphasised ideation over conducting research. Participants frequently mentioned the influence of personal or team interests more often than established research findings.

An electronic survey was developed and tested with six SCAD students who did not participate in the start-up competition. This survey included participant demographics, team mentors and judges, as well as exposure to or knowledge of service design.

This exposure to and knowledge of service design was delineated further into service design classes, literature, tools, industry firms and access to the word associations report. This survey was adapted based on feedback given and distributed to start-up participants.

Touchpoint 11-1 77

All participants self-reported their individual results via an electronic form without the supervision of the research team. Service design knowledge was categorised into tools included in the start-up project, tools present in individual design portfolios, attendance of a breakout session during the start-up competition delivered by a service design student on the previously mentioned word association report, access and review of the online word association report, acronym recognition of service-dominant logic (SDL) and familiarity with service design firms.

It is significant to note that each team was required to include a business model canvas as part of their final project. Unsurprisingly, 15 out of 16 participants checked business model canvas as a tool included in their project.

In individual portfolios, on the other hand, a business model canvas is only included in five of the participants’ portfolios. Despite many teams’ final proposals being service-dominant, only three teams included a service blueprint in their start-up project. The only participants to recognise the acronym of SDL were current service design students (18.8%, n=3); all other students answered incorrectly, stating SDL was an acronym for service design logic (37.5%, n=6), strategic design leadership (31%, n=5), or system development language (12.5%, n=2).

At least half of the participants acknowledged two or more service design courses as influencing their final start-up deliverable. Some participants noted specific service design professors, resources or a service design perspective from fellow teammates as an advantage in this specific start-up event. The findings did not suggest the presence of a service design student alone would guarantee a finalist position, however.

Key insights discovered by the researchers were a discrepancy between design tools used in the start-up competition and tools presented in individual portfolios, a lack of recognition of the acronym SDL amongst non-service design majors, and the influence of leadership including past and current professors as well as start-up mentors during the week process.

78 Touchpoint 11-1

Implications for service design education This study attempted to highlight the role of service design education and exposure in the culture of start-up competitions. By comparing the curriculum style and methodologies of the service design programme at SCAD to the effects of service design in a start-up competition, the researchers were able to explore the importance of education in service design.

1. Encourage interdisciplinary toolset and collaboration

With the discrepancies between the tools utilised in the start-up competition versus the tools presented in a portfolio, this suggests that perhaps within design schools, interdisciplinary collaboration may lead student design teams better equipped with a more diverse toolset. The mismatch between the utilisation of the business model canvas within the start-up competition and the presence in individual portfolios suggest service design and design education should encourage interdisciplinary tools within potential portfolio projects such as the business model canvas, journey mapping or service blueprints.

2. Understanding Service Dominant Logic will help

transition to service-based economy

With a lack of recognition of the acronym SDL amongst non-service design majors, a foundation for service education could be embedded in the concept ‘service-dominant logic,’ (SDL) which describes the paradigm shift from a goods-based economy to a service-based economy.2 Surprisingly, in this study, the researchers found there was a lack of understanding not necessarily in terms of service design education but within the core foundation of SDL. This suggests design students from various disciplines even beyond service design, particularly those in start-up competitions or interested in entrepreneurship, may also consider the significance of understanding the current transition to a service-based economy.

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

3. Role of facilitating educator

Many participants in the survey and in interviews noted the influence of leadership over their final start-up proposal as well as their process throughout. Some teams noted a directional change from a goods-based concept to a service-based concept during the competition solely due to a mentor feedback session. In the questionnaire free response section asking participants about specific courses or professors which influenced this specific start-up event, several noted a particular service design professor and their extensive literature database.

Despite the fact that service design education tools, terminology and firms contributed to team perspectives, the leadership facilitating the service education was just as – if not more – crucial to students’ perspectives in a start-up competition. It is more about the context in which service design education is delivered and the role of the facilitating educator in this context.

With the potential for the expansion of service design academic programmes in the United States, it is necessary to understand the influence of service design in a start-up competition or business. Team dynamics in start-up competitions or beyond ideally should incorporate a service-dominant perspective, exposure to service design principles and a built network within the service design community.

1 Manhaes, M. (2017, July 6). Three Overarching Perspectives of Service Design: Understanding stakeholder, innovation and institution.

Retrieved from https://www.service-design-network.org/ touchpoint/touchpoint-9-1-education-and-capacity-building/threeoverarching-perspectives-of-service-design 2 Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2016). Institutions and axioms: an extension and update of service-dominant logic. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44(1), 5-23.

3 Buckley, P., Dr., & Majumdar, R., Dr. (2018, July 12). The services powerhouse: Increasingly vital to world economic growth. Retrieved from https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/economy/issues-bythe-numbers/trade-in-services-economy-growth.html

Touchpoint 11-1 79

Luis Alt Meet the service designer

Established in 2010, Livework’s São Paulo outpost is a service design pioneer in one of the world’s top-ten largest economies Brazil. Since then, the team has worked with an enviable roster of clients, but also experienced the challenges of carrying out service design before it became widely recognised. In this Luis Alt founded Livework in Brazil and created the first Design Thinking course in Latin America. Since 2017, he is a jury member of the Service Design Award and has co-founded SDN's Brazilian Chapter. luis.alt@liveworkstudio.com.br

edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks to Luis Alt, one of the studio’s founders.

Jesse Grimes: Next year will mark ten years of Live­work's Brazilian studio. There are only a small handful of specialist service design agencies around the world that have been around that long. What was it like establishing service design in Brazil back then, and how have you seen the market mature in the meantime?

Luis Alt: We are delighted to have seen service design develop into an established discipline and to have contributed to its success in Brazil.

When I got started, in 2009, I founded the first service design agency in Brazil, only because there were no companies hiring service designers back then.

At the beginning of 2010, we were fortunate enough to have Livework founders Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie believe in the dream we had for service design in our region, and this led to us becoming Livework São Paulo.

80 Touchpoint 11-1

Considering the influence that the United States has on our country, we decided that our initial focus should be on Design Thinking instead of service design. So, in 2010, we founded a Design Thinking course at a reputable business and marketing university in São Paulo called ESPM. The following year we published the first book on the subject that was written in Portuguese, and it was filled with local project cases.

We later found out that those were really pioneering activities of their kind from throughout Latin America.

Deciding to explore Design Thinking as a concept and to educate the market were two of the best moves we could have ever made.

Back then, it was all about this ‘new way’ of doing things, not as much the object of change (ser­v ices). As time passed, we began intro­ducing to the market some concepts that are

p ro f i l e

Livework São Paulo has been open for business since 2010 and have been responsible to take Service Design to the biggest and most important organisations in Brazil

more attached to services, reinforcing our position as service design pioneers in the world.

Convincing business executives to invest in design at a strategic level, however, was very difficult. When we started here, Livework had been on the road for about a decade in Europe but, because project results have always been hard to gather and scepticism reigned among executives, landing important projects was very difficult. Today the market is in a different place.

Organisations understand what design can bring and are more open to diving in to situations that are more open-ended and risky – they have no choice.

Also, the track record that we currently have helped to change the way projects are sold and delivered.

Lately, I see the evolution of service design in the region in many ways. First, the demand for service design instead of Design Thinking has been growing.

Clients are more familiar with what we do, so many briefs come with the understanding of how we can generate value within organisations. It is much more common to work with clients that are also service designers, which shows how much the discipline has evolved. Having educated thousands of professionals

with open workshops or in-company ones, we see terms like ‘service blueprint’ and ‘customer journey’ being used more frequently in business meetings, which are more user-centred than ever. Finally, as I mentioned before, it is often the case that it’s no longer necessary to convince executives of the benefits of design. It is now widely understood and valued by a large group of decision-makers.

I don’t see many differences between our region and other parts of the world in the way service design (or design in general) has evolved.

We finally got a seat on the table, we are helping organisations to make crucial decisions and take significant steps, and we are developing a universal language that is recognised more broadly. We still face challenges to get projects implemented the way we thought of them, and to have precise ROI numbers to attach to our business cases. We learned, nevertheless, that working as close as possible with clients and establishing a continuous relationship with them can help with both of those challenges. All in all, the market has gotten more confident with what design can deliver.

Touchpoint 11-1 81

Although languages and borders understandably divide

I’m interested to learn a little more about what it’s like

the market, I have been very impressed to see the scale

to pioneer service design in a market where it’s mostly

at which interaction design is being practised in Latin

unknown, and how to make a success of it. Looking

America and South America. For example, the IxDA's

back to your early days, what was it that helped you

regional conference there now exceeds their global

establish yourselves, and establish the value of service

conference in size, and Touchpoint sees increasingly

design? Are there techniques or advice can you share

more submissions from these regions. How would you

with service designers today who are playing similarly

characterise the practice of service design in Brazil, in

pioneering roles in places such as Eastern Europe,

comparison to Europe and North America?

Africa, Southeast Asia and India?

South America, as a region, is very much divided.

Besides the continental proportions, we have, as you’ve mentioned, a language barrier that sets Brazil apart from the rest of the countries (we speak Portuguese, almost all other countries use Spanish). So, unfortunately, real integration is still far from occurring – even though IxDA’s regional conference is a landmark, and one of the best movements in this direction.

Although we have many huge corporations in the region, the current state of service delivery, in general, still feels very much behind Europe and the United States. We do have some sectors that are global benchmarks, such as financial services and beverages, but that’s not usually the case. So, while in our studios in Europe talk about ‘humanising services’, over here we are still doing many projects that focus on plain ‘digital transformation’. It is more common to see organisations still running to catch up to a new market benchmark set by someone else, rather than actually pushing a service agenda forward. The good news is that we feel we are able to help companies become digital by having a client obsession embedded from the start, instead of adding that element once they’re already there.

We’ve also seen a keen interest by companies to have internal capabilities to deliver on service design instead of only hiring projects from agencies like ours. Therefore, we have been doing many projects to help define a strategy for service design and to build capability through method development and training.

This movement has been happening from the day we opened our São Paulo studio, so we’ve been helping many organisations to have their own ‘Livework operation’.

We began with training, organising events and talking about design in general. Before we became Livework, we used the few projects we had in our track record, as well as cases by renowned agencies (such as Livework) to explain the benefits of service design. Our urgency was to generate awareness to convince potential clients of what we could do, while also building a community around service design so that other people would talk about it as well. Back in 2010, I don’t know how, but we had a ‘Ning’ community called ‘Service Design BR’ with more than two thousand people that were curious about the subject. I’m not sure where all those people are now, but I’m pretty sure we did make some noise back then, to start building momentum.

Connecting with our peers overseas and participating in the global community was also very important. I was fortunate to go to the first SDN conference in Amsterdam, and since everyone is very open, I made good friends with people that are now central to the community.

Chatting with them virtually or in person always brought insights to the work we were developing in Brazil.

Lastly, I would say that practising is an essential thing in the beginning. Having your work to show, getting acquainted with tools and learning to create new ones on the go is what makes you more confident to work on more important jobs, once you get them. Seeking to create impact, even if it’s small at first, and getting your hands dirty with passion for what you do is truly the secret sauce. This last part is such a cliché that I’m ashamed of having said it. However, it is absolutely real!

82 Touchpoint 11-1

Buy your ticket today!

Join the Service Design Global Conference 2019 on 10 – 11 October, with exclusive Members’ Event on 9 October! www.tinyurl.com/sdgc2019 www.tinyurl.com/sdgc19venue

The First SDN China National Conference Held in Shanghai The ‘Service Design Futures’ event took place from 23rd to 24th April in Shanghai Jing’an district, with more than 1,000 participants from across China and around the world. The two-day programme was filled with more than 30 presentations, the Successful Design Awards ceremony, and a trade show with sponsors and representatives making contact with the attendees, who included both seasoned professionals and service design newcomers.

Both respected academics and business experts shared their expertise and the latest trends in service design.

84 Touchpoint 11-1

The SDN’s Shanghai chapter partnered with the global Service Design Network, CBi China Bridge and the Successful Design organisation to bring this amazing event together, which looked at how we deal with the complexity of creating purposeful and valuable experiences – with a unique focus on the Chinese perspective of service design.

China is continuously scaling the service design industry and digital content industry through

inside sdn

policy innovation, technological innovation and cultural innovation.

In January 2019, China’s Ministry of Commerce incorporated service design into the ‘Outsourcing Industry Key Development Area Guidance Catalogue (2018 Edition)’, indicating the strategic value placed on service design at a national level. Within China, service design is changing the service industry, and contributing to the development of new enterprises.

Touchpoint 11-1 85

Chapter Success Stories 2018/19

We are proud to present the amazing work of our SDN chapters from around the world. This annual publica­ tion shares personal insights into the service design national conferences, events, meet-ups, publications and other innovative initiatives that chapters have organised throughout the past year. Download your free copy from the SDN website for the full story!

Insights from chapter representatives On the following pages we will present you with some of the success stories our award-winning chapters have contributed to throughout 2018, as well as best practices from all around the globe. Chapter representatives have answered questions posed by the SDN headquarters team about their activities, to provide personal insights and practical tips.

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We hope this will offer both inspiration and guidance for your own service design activities in 2019.

Sharing best practices We’ll continue to share, celebrate and learn from the outstanding work of our community. For more information about chapters, check out the posts on the Chapters pages of the SDN website, or contact chapter management at: chapter@ service-design-network.org

Download the Chapter Success

An empowered inter­natio­n­al network SDN chapters are franchise institutions that are autonomously managed by teams of passionate, local service design volunteers. Since 2008, we have grown to forty-five chapters across five continents.

Stories 2018/19 publication at: www.service-designnetwork.org/uploads/ chapter-successstories-2018:19.pdf

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28 Making

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Benefits for SDN Members SDN members are entitled to a free printed copy of each new issue of Touchpoint (p­ostage cost not included).

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Selected articles are also published on Medium.

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www.service-design-network.org Touchpoint 11-1 87