Feature: People-Centred Innovation climbs the Agenda

The recent "People-Inspired Innovation" conference organised by Chimera at Adastral Park, Ipswich, prompted me to reflect on the findings of last year’s DTI Mission to the west coast of the US (see UN story: People-Centred Design Trip yields Innovation Advice) and gave me the opportunity to find out if there were any advances or changes in the area.

My question for the mission last year focussed on the integration of user research in the innovation and design process. I saw two examples on the mission. BMW DesignWorks innovation group have integrated experience frameworks as their user knowledge into their innovation process. Intel had been prompted to carry out research in China and as a result developed an “educational PC” that has educational software and a physical lock on the machine that switches between educational packages, and access to games and the Internet.

At the "People-Inspired Inovation" conference, Alex Mack from Pitney Bowes gave another example. Alex showed how user research had been used to develop a smart mailer for SMEs and talked about how they engaged other parts of the business in the process. One of the issues that arose was how filtered or worked up ideas should be before they are evaluated by others. She also talked about keeping a “shelf of ideas” for the right time. Interestingly, the project has led to the development of a product but was criticised within the innovation group as not being innovative enough. This begs the question whether it is a compromise.

Matt Locke from BBC Creative R&D spoke about broadening innovation in a similar vein to Flikr by opening up data assets, providing tools, cultivating communities and seeing what happens next. He showed various applications that developers in the public domain had built as part of the backstage project. It made me wonder how we can shape this creativity to ensure applications are designed for a wider community.

There were several papers on changing practice but speakers did not take the further step in to design. Julie Janson Bennett of PDD spoke about the changing practice of product design and the changing role of the organisation. Rebecca Ellis and Anna Haywood of Chimera spoke about the changing practice of collectors, given internet services such as eBay. Louise Ferguson spoke about re-framing a problem space for environments constructed for creative SMEs.

Other papers, although interesting, adopted a more top-down rather than people-centred approach. Peter Cochrane spoke about business trends. Hannah McBain of BBC Creative R&D spoke about scenario planning children’s digital lives amongst experts in the BBC, and Pat Jordan gave us a framework of four pleasures.

My sense is that more people are adopting a people-inspired innovation approach but more case studies are needed and it is still early days in integrating this approach within organisations.

Rachel Jones
Instrata

Associated Link: Instrata

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