One of my first internship experiences was in a very small enterprise: just a handful of employees and an increasingly heavy workload on our shoulders.
The market in question was expanding and the clients were everyday more and more exigent. But the majority of our daily business was employed making photocopies, taking care of the archives and the logs, that were all stored in giant binders. There were a lot of strict rules on how to store the documents: how many copies we had to make of each of them, how to fill forms manually etc…
I found it weird – to say the least – that the company had no digital system to keep the documents, and that to retrieve and information you had to sit down on the floor of the office with a 500 pages binder in front of you and try to read someone else’s handwriting from three years earlier.
Few years later I heard speaking of design thinking for business for the first time, and I immediately thought back of the small company I had briefly interned for. They definitely needed some innovation process to improve the service (which was very good by the way, despite the old fashioned methods they used).
This waste of resources resulted in a slow and under – effective service to the final clients, who could have enjoyed a higher quality of the service if an effort was made to render the office work more productive. In the end, every step of the organisational chain reflected on the experience of the end user.
However, re- shaping a service is a complex operation itself. Change can be fairly radical and hard to implement; especially when it’s about a small or micro enterprise, which relies on a particular business model and has no time, or will to risk something entirely new.
“Never delegate understanding”
– Charles Eames
Enters Design Thinking
Design thinking has recently become very popular, and has been defined by Forbes as the next competitive advantage companies of every size should invest in.
The core tools are quite easy to use and understand: everyone can learn how to draw an empathy map or draft a persona in just one afternoon.
Nonetheless, design thinking techniques are hardly applicable in different business contexts if not accompanied by a thorough understanding of each company and its environment: that’s why in this article the Italian entrepreneur Nicola Mattina points out the necessity of “mixed teams”, composed of external experts and internal staff members.
“The team dealing with introducing and spreading design thinking in a company should be composed of staff member and consultants. The first should have the role of facilitators, while the second should be involved for the actual design activities.”
Innovation is a horizontal process that cannot be imposed or imported from outside.
It requires the internal knowledge of employees and front line managers, as they know the exact problems to target and solve. It needs also the external gaze of a consultant and the technical knowledge of a designer. In a nutshell, it’s not only made of colourful post- it on the walls, but it also requires an effort and an investment in terms of time, money and re – organisation of staff and processes.
So the question becomes:
How to incentivize enterprises to invest in structured innovation processes?
I often reflect on my first office experience, and I wonder what could have been different if instead of focusing on a lot of unproductive habits we’d have pulled out empathy maps, customer journey descriptions and we’d have optimised our way of getting things done.
On the other hand I try to put myself in the shoes of my old boss and business owner. Was it really the wise thing to do for him, to focus on innovation processes? We were just 4 – 5 employees, all super busy dealing with clients, invoices and paperwork. Did he really had the energy or the resources to put aside daily business and start re – thinking the whole service, or even only parts of it, maybe hiring external experts as consultants?
From a totally non – technical point of view, the challenge for service designers is to become appealing for small and micro businesses, as well as for big R&D corporate departments.
Small entrepreneurs can benefit enormously from innovation of services and processes, but they need the right incentives to take the leap and invest in design thinking activities and other innovation tools.
It won’t be an easy goal, but if the culture of innovation keeps spreading al also at micro companies level, it will turn out to be a win – win for both businesses, employees and clients.
Student of IPM @Unibo. Interested in political science, economics, media, technology & innovation. Curious,
proactive and always up for new experiences.
proactive and always up for new experiences.
