Simone Cicero Meet the service designer
Along with other partners, Simone Cicero launched the Platform Design Toolkit. Bringing together service design, business model innovation, lean startup and customer development, the Toolkit helps designers and businesspeople alike to identify and harness the power of platforms. In this profile, he chats with Touchpoint Simone Cicero is creator of Platform Design Toolkit, and managing partner at Boundaryless, a company that helps organizations create platform strategies to mobilize ecosystems for growth, impact and evolution.
Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes. Jesse Grimes: For those readers that aren’t familiar with the concept of platform design and the “Platform Design Toolkit”, can you give a short introduction to the work you've been doing and what it’s about?
Simone Cicero: I created the Platform Design Canvas in 2013, as a derivative of the Business Model Canvas. The canvas evolved into a toolkit since then, in a conversation with the design, innovation and business strategy communities. Feedback has been collected in several masterclasses, exchanges and workshops. Technically speaking the toolkit is a methodology, based on a set of canvases that provide an aid to teams and individuals that want to design for an ecosystem. The set of canvasses comes with a user guide (we’re aiming to release a more comprehensive manual), a regular publication on Medium, and a newsletter aimed at sharing our way to apply this 78 Touchpoint 9-3
thinking. In terms of inspirations, I would say that Platform Design is a child of service design, business model innovation, lean startup and customer development. The main objective of the platform design toolkit – which has become clearer after few years of using it and researching it – is probably that it helps us move from the ‘industrial perspective’ of customercentred design into the ‘post industrial perspective’. We believe this post industrial perspective must be ecosystem-centred or – much better – relationship-centred. We always say that is about moving from organising production, to organising interaction. It’s a way for companies to think without boundaries, beyond the traditional limitations of employees and resources. Everyone can now work for you (with you) if you craft the right set of incentives. We believe that individuals and individual entities (small organizations, teams) play an ever greater role in
