Collaborate to Innovate? Getting
Fresh Small Company Thinking
into Big Company Innovation
mark hicks
Vodafone | [e-mail]

Inspired by Lego’s pioneering explorations into co-design— Cuusoo— the “openness” zeitgeist, and several of our own ad hoc co-design initiatives, Vodafone decided to probe more systematically into the possibilities of actively co-designing with our customers. Like in all great adventures, we set out with certain expectations but came out with a lot more to think about than we had anticipated. Rather than focusing on the outcome of this work, I will describe the lessons learned from the journey. Although we ultimately co-designed some great ideas for products and services, it was the journey and associated discoveries that were particularly instructive.

Much current sentiment advocates co-design as a human, fashionable, and possibly ideologically appropriate process for contemporary brands to engage with. But these are not strong arguments for a company to justify changing its innovation processes. So our own co-design experiences needed to establish something more rigorous, more tangible, and positively differentiated if we were to bring the discussion into the business in a meaningful way.

Our co-design program had a sense of the informal social experiment about it. We manipulated some variables by design, ran a few loose controls, and fixed stuff on the fly that didn’t seem to be working. We didn’t intend for our analysis to be founded on anything other than qualitative observation, but this in itself provided clear and unexpected findings.

The broad aim of our co-design initiative was to explore the potential of co-design to give Vodafone insights into new ways to create innovative, differentiated, and compelling future service and product concepts through ideation, design, and prototyping directly with our customers.

cultural challenges
There are quite a few co-
design examples in industry.
Companies such as Muji,
Procter & Gamble, Shell, BMW,
and Lego have all effectively
implemented some form of co-
design strategy over several
years. Such has been the value
of co-design to Lego that it has
now been implemented as the
core of the company’s product
definition and development
process. Nonetheless, for most
companies co-design is new
territory; the idea of “open-
ing up” can be worrying, and
most companies hesitate to
share ideas and strategies with
people they don’t employ. But
the promise of new products,
new and profitable ventures,
new ways of thinking, and new
energy is an attractive prize.

[ 1] Lego Group.
Personal
Communication,
03.06.09 with author
May + June 2010