My Job is in Innovation and I don’t like Pizza
What do innovation and pizza have to do with each other? Turns out — a lot.
A few weeks ago I moved to New York City to be part of developing Oracle’s innovation services in North America. In true Malin-spirit I threw myself out there to get to know:
- All things related to innovation in this city,
- Every person working with innovation in this city, and
- How to create visibility to be someone you’d want to know in the field of innovation in this city.
No place better, than to join meetups with people in the field and then volunteer to write about the event. So that’s what I did.
My first event was with the NYC Chapter of the Service Design Network, also called the NYC Service Design Collective, run entirely by volunteers who are passionate about Service Design. The SDN is a global organization which states to be, ‘The leading non-profit institution for expertise in Service Design and a driver of global growth, development and innovation within the practice.’
We (yes, I’m now part of the Tribe) typically meet the second Tuesday of the month to share knowledge, collaborate and, yes, it seems, to eat pizza. When telling people of my dislike for pizza, I tend to get horrified looks from the person on the other side. And just a week earlier, the NYC Chapter of the SDN conducted a service safari to explore and evaluate local Manhattan pizza places, so it seems if I want to be part of this club I better start enjoying this dish.
Last Tuesday, with two slices of Hawaiian pizza on my plate, a group of Service Designers and Corporate innovators joined on the premises of Capital One Commercial Labs and the event was opened by the NYC Chapter leaders; Natalie Kuhn, Kathleen C. and Antonio Cesare Iadarola to set the scene and introduce the two main speakers Jesse Grimes and Mike Pinder.
Jesse Grimes kicked off the session. He is an independent Service Design practitioner (kolmiot.com), SVP of the Service Design Network, Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Touchpoint”, and co-founder of the SDN Academy and covered the topic ‘Making the Case for Service Design for Start-ups and Innovation.’ The following speaker Mike Pinder, a Senior Innovation Consultant from Board of Innovation, explained to the audience how to ‘Apply Service Design while Innovating like a Start-up.’
Making the Case for Service Design for Start-ups and Innovation
In his talk, Jesse covered the value of Service Design for start-ups and innovation environments along with the potentials (and challenges) they can offer Service Designers. He argued that ‘Service Design (thinking) can help innovators deliver better products, earn stronger customer relationships, and create more value than ever before.’ He started by providing a comparison of a (Google) design sprint and discussing the value of incorporating Service Design, especially as a ‘regular’ design sprint takes input from the user/customer only at the last stage of the process while it’s part of several stages in Service Design.
‘Service Design (thinking) can help innovators deliver better products, earn stronger customer relationships, and create more value than ever before.’ — Jesse Grimes
Jesse moved on to compare Service Design with Lean start-up to learn that the latter is a more focused and narrow way of working while Service Design uses a broad range of techniques to get a more holistic understanding. Lean start-up is is solution focused and aims to find a market-fit for a specific product, Service Design on the other hand highlights the full grasp of a problem to get insights of unmet needs in the market. Only then do you in create solutions to meet them.
As I finished my first slice of pizza, he concluded that, while many start-ups use design sprints and Lean start-up in developing their solutions, Service Design can provide benefits in terms of both mindset and techniques.
In the second part of Jesse’s talk he gave his perspective on what Service Designers can do to leverage the opportunities for start-ups to innovate using Service Design. His five main tips for working with start-ups were:
- Be a chameleon — Adjust how you name and describe your activities and even your role to fit your current environment.
- Create a ‘service ecosystem’ — Gather the team in a workshop to get a shared and visual understanding of the service you’re developing.
- Get comfortable with canvases — As a start-up, pinning down your value proposition and business model are critical concerns where canvasses can support this activity.
- Push the service perspective — Encourage the team to break free of the ‘product’ mindset and expore the service they’re creating.
- Learn the start-up language — The more clear we can be in our communication, the more efficient we will collaborate and create results. Learning the vocabulary of your audience is key in this process.
Apply Service Design While Design while Innovating like a Start-up
Mike Pinder was second to take the stage. Mike’s perspective was focused on Service Design within Corporate Innovation. He argued that Service Design supports to de-risk projects across the entire innovation process and addresses high-level uncertainty and functions as an effective stand-alone discipline in corporate start-up projects.
Innovation is, ‘the commercialization of the idea.’
There are many views of what innovation is, and few people have the same definition of the word. In this context, we agreed with Everett Rogers that innovation is, ‘the commercialization of the idea.’ The goal of organizations is to create business impact, and using Service Design (along with other tools and methodologies) is not enough on its own to succeed with real business impact but needs to be part of the wider process. For anyone working with Design Thinking, we know that the ‘Innovation sweet spot’ is the combination of the three aspects of desirability, viability and feasibility. Highlighted in this session was that the starting point is always the customer along with the question of desirability.
The ‘Innovation sweet spot’ is the combination of the three aspects of desirability, viability and feasibility.
There’s no general definition or strict line between when to use the different methodologies in innovation, and I almost choked on my last piece of pizza from excitement, when Mike presented his view of the answer to this question. I have heard several views of the arrangement of this slide and am very curious to read yours in the comments field below as well (Share your view, please!)
Independently of what methodology is used and when, the key message was that it doesn’t matter all that much. Do not get locked in on one concept but rather focus on finding the combination that builds the innovation capability you and your organization require as and when needed.
Service Design has ‘stratified usage and repetition of tools and methods with other disciplines’ and though the methodology hasn’t yet been widely invested in Fortune 500’s as much as other well known tools, there’s high value in incorporating it into large organizations in order to support them in their ability to know better, cheaper and quicker methods than the competition.
There’s high value in incorporating (Service Design) into large organizations in order to support them in their ability to know better, cheaper and quicker methods than the competition. — Mike Pinder
In relation to the teaching of the ‘Four types of Innovation,’ there are two areas that Service Design can be of use, namely incremental (re)-innovation and radical innovation.
Ending the second talk, the four main points Mike leaves the audience of Service Designers with are:
- Add holistic value across the innovation process rather than in silo’s (access to broader knowledge is enabled).
- Interface your Service Design skills across the Service Design gaps(in between the main methodologies highlighted above).
- Learn to speak the language of innovation (be able to communicate across disciplines and enable teams to know quicker).
- Forget the labels and focus on enabling knowing, fast!
In conclusion…
During the evening we covered the value of Service Design for both corporates and start-ups and the opportunities that Service Designers have in each field. The night ended with a passionate discussion and the existential question on whether we are Design Thinkers, Service Designers, Business Designers and Innovators or something else? We concluded that it doesn’t matter all that much what label we put on ourselves but that we are all creative problem solvers that need to create business impact quickly and at a low cost.
A common challenge in innovation is to build the team, making sure that it’s small enough to act fast while including all relevant and required competencies. On the topic of pizza and innovation, I leave you with the wisdom of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos and his Two Pizza Rule:
‘Never have a meeting where two pizzas can’t feed the entire group.’
So, if you want to get insight into Service Design and connect with great people in the field, join us on January 14th in the pizza capitol of the world, NYC (sorry Italy)! Or, look up/start your own local chapter. If you would like to share your view, next time you may write the article. And if all that is not compelling enough: There will be pizza.
*** This article is summarizing the event and is based on my personal view of the evening***
