Combining design thinking and lean start-up methodologies in large organisations

It is common knowledge that sharing is caring. We believe this also applies to the design world. The past couple of years have seen us work hard to integrate design thinking into the way business exploration is conducted at Fortum. We’ve had good growth and successes over these couple of years and are now excited to both share what we’ve learned as well as learn from others at the design community at large.

At the end of April, we hosted a meet-up together with Service Design Network Finland and Fazer. Service design enthusiasts were invited to join and discuss their experiences, ideas and inspiration involving design in organisations.

Design thinking and lean start-up methods — two sides of the same coin?

Our evening focused on exploring the ways design thinking and lean start-up methods can be adopted in large organisations, using Fortum and Fazer as two examples.

Through a case example involving our electric vehicle charging stations (Charge&Drive) we talked about how Fortum combines both creative exploration and agile validation in product and service development. This business exploration framework has two parallel tracks:

• Discover-track focusing on exploring customer needs and turning those into insights and hypotheses; and,
• Deliver-track in which teams build prototypes to validate the assumptions in order to pin-point desirable business opportunities.

This way Fortum teams are continuously in touch with customers by using qualitative methods to build empathy and quantitative experiments to understand possibilities on the market.

We also heard an example of how Fazer Lab has helped Fazer to bring design and customer-centricity to the core of its business with its transformative innovation process; the story of their Yosa yoghurt line being one of its latest examples.

Listening to the consumer and exploring their needs with design thinking as well as the continuous validation of customer interest with lean start-up methods both support the same overall goal of creating new business.

Despite the different industries Fortum and Fazer represent, it could clearly be seen through these presentations that the customer and the user are the ones who matter the most. Both companies seem to share a common understanding that listening to the consumer and exploring their needs with design thinking as well as the continuous validation of customer interest with lean start-up methods support the same overall goal of creating new business. Better yet, they seem to complement each other on the way to it.

Working with design should be designed to work

To ensure our event participants also had a chance to shine we had included brief workshop discussions as a part of the evening. Each of these five workshops focused on slightly different problem areas of design work in an organisation, ranging from topics such as managing exploration in global design teams, encouraging user-centric research approach throughout the organisation, as well as sharing best practices regarding customer validation processes. The active and insightful discussions clearly showcased people’s interest and passion towards the topics as well as provided both us as organisers but also the other participants with new insights and perspectives on how to tackle these types of issues.

Although doing design work in an organisation is highly important, designing how this work is done, is just as crucial for its overall success.

Based on these discussions it became clear to see that although doing design work in an organisation is highly important, designing how this work is done is just as crucial for its overall success. We hope that all the people participating to this night were able to find some new ideas on how to advance design in their own work lives as well.

We’d like to once more thank everyone who participated in this meet-up and brought their own insights into the discussions. We hope to see more evenings like these in the future and continue to share our understanding on design and design work in organisations.