Collaborate to Innovate? Getting
Fresh Small Company Thinking
into Big Company Innovation
mark hicks
Vodafone | Mark.Hicks@vodafone.com
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