leverage the pile of shiny
new ideas that are brought
back from co-design. Creating
good ideas isn’t enough; it’s
about driving a new innova-
tion route into the business.
May + June 2010
creating co-design incubators
We wanted to see whether we
could create co-design “
incubators” in which concepts could
be hot-housed to a useful level
of maturity—one where a professional design team could
take away the product and
work with it to create service
and product prototypes.
We organized our co-design
team as a “club of experts” [ 2],
and we rejected other models such as crowd-sourced,
community-based, or coalition-based. Thanks to discussions
we held with other co-designing
organizations, we learned the
chemistry between participants
would be the key to success in
this type of organization, the
individuals would need to be
motivated, innovative thinkers,
and we would need to actively
manage the co-design teams
and be open with them.
We ran the co-design ses-
sions with both studio col-
laborators (people in the same
design studio) and remote
collaborators (connected
people at home linked to the
studio using various tools).
We wanted to understand
those aspects of co-design
that would allow the team to
generate lots of great ideas, yet
ensure people wanted to come
back for the next session.
interactions
what we learned
…about team organization
Find the right group size. We
maintained a stable working-
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