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-
40