How Can Design Organisations Innovate?
Co-creating a culture of value – Pt 1
Damn! How many articles have you seen recently about digital disruption, upcoming future trends, the transforming digital landscape, and the Silicon Valley unicorn companies?
Let me count them for you. Too many.
In terms of innovation, it‘s fairly easy to be carried away by the overwhelming amount of advice being handed out. Don’t get me wrong, some articles do a better job than others, and there are valuable pieces of information out there. The problem is there is too much theoretical thinking about the ever-changing digital environment.
The real challenge for design organisations is to foster innovation internally.
Nowadays, it seems most of the design firms that are willing to innovate, read those articles and simply shake the Magic 8 Ball to follow the first convincing answer, expecting to produce immediate innovation, right? — Wrong.
So, how do we Innovate?!
There is a lot being said about user-centred design, and how important user insights are to developing smart and meaningful design solutions. Agreed.
But what about the people who are behind the products and services? How do they drive the process to transform those insights into actual design solutions?
Raising innovation within a design company, requires improving how multidisciplinary teams manage the design-thinking process involved in developing products or services. They are the first people that have to engage with the design process in order to develop engaging and innovative experiences.
That’s why design organisations that want to innovate must, first of all, learn how their members can internally co-create a shared, differential, and constant value along the design process — what I call, robust value. And just after that, they can externalise that robust value, by shipping it within an innovative product or service.
In this article series, divided in three chapters, I’ll first talk about robust value. Then, during the second and the third chapter, I’ll tell you about co-creation and its foundations, as the basis to produce robust value.
“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.” — Robert L. Peters, Designer and Principal of Circle.
Robust Value
This sentence from Robert L. Peters really gets my point across: I understand that one of the most important duties of any design organisation is to create traditions. And by a tradition, I mean a tradition as part of a culture that has an inherent value among the members of a design company.
And that’s why is so relevant that design organisation that want to innovate, develop an internal culture of value — which will ultimately foster innovation.
So, let’s talk about how to do that with robust value.
I define robust value as an extensive concept of value, which is created and shared within multidisciplinary agile teams that produce digital products or services. Robust value, implies that teams must think together and communicate with transparency to become over time a value creating system with a shared ownership. This concept can be used at all stages of a product or service development.
And why do I call it robust value? Because the more agile teams work on it, the more consistent and solid that value becomes.
Creating Robust Value
The three essential attributes to robust value are:
1. Multidimensional Value
Multidisciplinary agile teams have a great advantage, because they combine people with different backgrounds and expertise. And yes, this situation gives them the chance to craft multidimensional value, by establishing a broader general vision across the process. That’s why agile teams have to make the most out of their wide expertise, and gather their knowledge around assumptions and from different points of view.
2. Differential Value
A differential value is an important factor as it’s distinctive in every agile team. It arises naturally as the sum of the diverse knowledge and ways of thinking possessed by the team members. An agile team can profit from their differential value by offering an authentic and genuine vision, which ultimately describes how and why a team adds a particular purpose to the design process.
3. Constant Value
Agile teams have to challenge the purpose of every assumption that they produce at all the stages of a product or service development. The more they challenge their assumptions, the better they will, over time, identify and increase value to their processes and methods. So, when a value is constant, it provides a uniform level of consistency across a full product or service.
Authors become value generators and a reason for connecting people. — Francesco Franchi, “Designing News”.
So far you may like the concept of robust value — but you ask yourself, how can agile teams find the grounds to produce and develop robust value? The right answer is co-creation, which I’ll be speaking about in the next chapter. Stay tuned!
Cheers,
Oriol
This article series is the result of several interesting talks with my dearest friend, Matteo Cavucci. So this one is for you. Grazzie tanti!
If you liked this article (or didn’t), I’ll be glad to know what are your thoughts about it. Feel free to drop a comment, I’ll respond as soon as possible. Meanwhile, you can also find me on Twitter writing about design and sharing other random thoughts.
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