Co-creating service innovations — It’s about people
8 aspects of collaboration to consider before kickstarting your next service innovation initiative.
Innovation is the gold rush of our decade. With new technologies leading the way to a thriving startup culture, most established companies feel the pressure to change, and often call upon consultancies to help them with the task. But even with the best processes, brightest minds, and best of intentions, it is not guaranteed that the collaboration will result in an outstanding market success. Sometimes projects fail. But why?
A couple of years back I decided to look into it in a bit more detail. I noticed that most articles dealing with service innovations and their road towards success mainly consider the service itself — was the idea good enough, was it based on customer insights and validated properly — whereas the highly complex dynamics related to people and collaboration are left with less attention.
So how is it that innovation projects with similar competences, processes, and methods may result in completely different outcomes?
This article outlines 8 aspects of co-creation that play a role in determining the outcome of service innovation projects. These generalised suggestions are based on the findings of my master’s thesis research for @aaltoBIZ, where I compared service innovation projects following the same exact process with similar teams, but resulting in very different outcomes. The research focused on project-based collaboration between a consultancy and their client.
1. Build a problem-based brief
‘Love the problem’ is the starting point of nearly all service design books and articles ever written, but still, it cannot be emphasized enough, also from a co-creation perspective; when building a team that’s aiming for innovation, a shared understanding of the problem is what binds the team together, guides them towards the same objective, and promotes shared ownership of the outcome.
If you try and gather a team around a pre-determined solution, you will unlikely reach the same level of motivation, as the project becomes not about innovation, but executing a vision that is not your own.
2. Invest in trust to allow criticism
Challenging each other plays a crucial role in innovation, as you want to push beyond the obvious. For constructive criticism to flourish, you need an environment where people trust one another and feel comfortable with speaking their mind openly. Projects aiming for innovation often involve people who haven’t previously worked together, and to build trust, transparency is a must.
In the end, transparency is all about breaking away from the façade of perfection, admitting every project has its problems and pains, and communicating about them openly.
3. Stop avoiding conflicts
It’s rare to see an innovative service that would not have gone through a few pivots and numerous iterations. But in order to get to the point where you make the decision to change the course, you need a conflict, which is something people naturally try to avoid. A team that is built on trust and transparency is more likely to bring about the need to change, and come out of it stronger than before.
This is not to say that conflicts should be approached lightheartedly, nor that you should disagree just for the sake of it, but instead that teams should be careful not to continue on a ruinous path just to avoid confrontation.
4. Understand that innovation cannot be outsourced
Established companies can gain a lot of creative power by bringing in consultants or designers outside of their own organization, but that does not mean freedom from responsibility or an emptier schedule. A fresh pair of eyes with experience across different industries can push ideas further and guide through the process, but alone, external consultants lack the deep knowledge about the specific organization and industry in question, which are often required to achieve a remarkable outcome.
If hiring an external consultancy for help, companies should still expect an innovation project to be a full-time job, not a project you can outsource and oversee.
5. Work as one dedicated team and fade out silos
There’s no question that when you have a committed and dedicated team where people personally trust one another, you are going to achieve better outcomes. It’s not uncommon to see teams where individuals are spread around different physical locations and work on multiple projects simultaneously, but when striving for innovations, such a setting is essentially a fast track towards a disappointing outcome.
For the project to reach its full potential, you should promote active communication, aim to break silos, and reduce the need for handovers by having the core team at the same premises, all focusing on a single project together.
6. Choose your champions and feed enthusiasm
Innovation requires change, and most often, change is not received with only positive reactions. It is a joint responsibility of the team to advocate for the project, but you will need a person who is directly responsible for celebrating and managing the required change within your organization. And to add to the complexity, it is not only the organization outside the core team that needs reassuring, but it’s best to be mindful of the team’s own spirit as well.
The required organisational changes, tight deadlines, and critical feedback are likely to downgrade motivation at times, but by anticipating this, you are in a better position to prevent issues and react if they come about.
7. Don’t over-standardize the process
As the outcome of innovation projects is often difficult to predict, the funding is usually based on a well-outlined description of what the project aims for and how these goals will be met. To this end, it helps if you are able to rigorously describe the methodology and process you will be following, but the team should be careful not to cling on to this pre-defined process too tightly, or mindlessly copy best practices from other companies.
Each project is different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that would lead to success. It is up to the team’s collective expertise to understand the need and adjust their approach accordingly.
8. Keep the deadlines tight
A restricted timeframe can help the team narrow down their focus to the essential, reduce unproductive hassle, and set the standards for what is expected of the project. On the other hand, especially when it comes to projects aiming for innovation, schedules should not be enforced to a level where the team is unable to make necessary changes because they are so driven by upcoming deadlines.
You need a tight timeframe to focus and be productive, but if what you do isn’t working, the deadline should never enforce continuing as is. Unfortunately, it is not rare that established companies’ management procedures aren’t built to allow the necessary iteration.
The success of new service innovations is not only about how good your idea is, or how well you have investigated and validated if your solution fulfills what people need and desire; but importantly, it’s also about the people involved in the process of bringing the idea to life.
If you see that some of the aspects discussed here are an issue in your organization, you should consider creating an out-of-the-ordinary setting for your next innovation project, where people are freed from their usual roles and tasks, and given the chance to approach the upcoming project in a fresh and creative environment that fully supports collaborative innovation.
To conclude, the findings presented here are based on a research that considered collaboration between a design consultancy and their clients in projects related to digital transformation, and does not even intend to be exhaustive: I chose to summarize the findings that I felt were the most generalizable, and it’s very likely that different contexts and fields have specific issues not mentioned here. Do you feel that there’s something important missing? Or are there aspects you feel are especially relatable? Happy to hear your thoughts and feedback!
