Interview: What’s innovation to a Designer?
What does a strategic design company co-founder have to say about innovation
Who is Tiago?
I am a designer, co-founder and, managing partner at With Company and decided to create the best strategic design company to positively influence society thru design.
What’s innovation?
Innovation for me is the ability to effectively add value and generate impact thru an idea. Not necessarily a new, amazing, disrupting idea, it can be a simple one, but being able to create an impact, even if it’s about improving something that already exists.
Innovation is not only about disrupting something, is primarily about changing something for better, and that change can have different scales and proportions.
Why successful businesses have a hard time when it comes to innovation?
Well, I think because at some point in their history they’ve changed their focus to sustain the “innovation” they once created rather than keep pushing it further. It’s the “keep the engine running” attitude rather than thinking on new engines.
And with this mindset comes a lot of other constraints that don’t allow organizations to give themselves the time to think on new things, and then when they want to become more innovative, what do they do? They define specific slot-times for that… a one day workshop… or a week… or a company event… the point is, many times it’s not a continuous act but rather isolated initiatives.
It takes time to be innovative and it can take time to actually see something turning into an innovation.
As a start-up co-founder, what’s your biggest challenge?
Fist a small correction, we don’t consider ourselves a start-up ;)
Although growing, we are still a small strategic design consultancy company, and I would say our major challenge when talking to a new client is managing the “risk” perception and sometimes managing the expectations around the uncertainty of the result. Make them trust on our approach, process, and intelligence, especially with clients that are used to work with more established and “safer” companies. But that’s also where we differentiate and fortunately, we are having more and more good examples of our different approach.
It’s the “keep the engine running” attitude rather than thinking on new engines.
Tell us your thoughts about scaling
It’s quite hard, even for us and especially within our model. For non-design organizations, I think it’s even harder since it’s really about making a cultural change that can be very adverse to the existing environment.
You are in a pub with 5 top CEOs but very conservative ones. You are pitching about innovation in the middle of a few pints. What would you say?
I have no idea. Probably would try to understand first what innovation means to each one of them and how it reflects in their companies. What’s their innovation story.
What needs to change in established organizations?
I believe you need to change and influence the organizational context which is formed by the interplay of people, environment, and interactions (processes, procedures, norms, etc..). In a way change the company culture and attitude towards innovation. This could mean broadening the perspectives of people that already work in this organizations, or bringing/working with people that are aligned with the mindset you seek to establish and be able to inspire or influence others.
Tell us one story, or more, about innovation
Well, there are several. One it’s actually behind the origin of With Company, when me and my business partner, Rui Quinta, worked with a family business, wholesale fish company during 3 months — fishing for ideas project — and we were able to identify new sales channels, improving management and communication processes, and reduce their debt by ⅔, mainly because we were able to listen to them. We’ve spent a lot of time understanding them and their business.
A more recent innovation and transformation story is the work we’ve been doing for the Portuguese government. How we went from understanding how to mobilize rural landowners to identify the location and limits of their properties, to re-think an entire public service using big data and machine learning as a way to deduct and locate properties, automatically.
About the IT department, are those guys ready to innovate? How? Does it make sense to even have an IT department nowadays?
It depends how the organization decides to look to these people. Are they there just to sustain an infrastructure or to support the creation of new solutions?
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Most likely at With Company. If I look back, something that always has been there and kept me motivated and judging some decisions around my professional life has been the curiosity and possibility to experiment and learn how to best use design in different and more complex contexts. Something that we’ve been doing at With Company.
What’s your favorite quote?
I don’t have a favorite one but there’s one that has stuck to me.
I don’t know who said it, I think it was from an HR director from Google I saw on some youtube video while researching for a project (I've been trying to find that video ever since). He said something like…
“If you hire people because they are talented and creative, you should allow them to use their talent and creativity.”
I found this very powerful and not just regarding creativity. For me, it’s really about trusting and creating the necessary conditions for people to perform at their best and be able to fully use whatever capability you’ve recognized on them and made you want to work with them.
Where can we find you?
