Engaging the value network

My ongoing research deals with opening up new windows of opportunity between current and potential value networks – new constellations of companies that will add value to each other’s activities, products and services. The analysis in the previous project clearly showed Dizplay’s interdependency to other companies. By constructively utilizing such relations between people and organizations the project aims at establishing a forum and concrete partnerships to develop innovative products, services and systems across companies. The project is named Trackers and takes place in collaboration with researchers from the Sønderborg Participatory Innovation REsearch centre⁴ (SPIRE), which is a part of the University of Southern Denmark. Our assumption is that Dizplay as a sub-supplier necessarily must strategically and practically embrace the user-driven approach in consortium with partners in its value network to share the vision of system innovation. Innovation in this field necessitates collaboration among a number of players as each of the companies has a limited field of expertise. Understanding the potential synergies between the companies and how to practically utilize them to serve end-user needs is one of the challenges. One of the outcomes of the research was a Value Network Vision Seminar co-hosted by the SPIRE centre and Dizplay. The intention was to kick off internal Dizplay activities and send a strong signal to the value network partners that Dizplay has a pro-active approach to innovation and create an event that directly inspires and challenges traditions and ways-of-doing. The reasoning behind this is very similar to Rohn’s (2006) observation. Dizplay must involve and understand the central stakeholders to achieve results. In this case the central stakeholders are found not only in the internal organization but include external partners and potential customers as they have the same importance in bringing novel products to market for a small sub-supplier. The purpose of the Vision seminar was first of all to facilitate the vision of user-driven innovation and make it resonate within the value network. By bringing various perspectives into the seminar we spurred some interest and willingness to embrace this approach. We invited speakers from Denmark’s largest train operator to frame the seminar activities in a business perspective as well as an experienced design anthropologist to share her experience.

Less orthodox was our approach to invite participants to make sense of our user studies of train conductors and train passengers and (hopefully) see the potential in involving end-users in the innovation process. One of the partners in the SPIRE centre is the Dacapo theatre⁵ that for a number of years has worked with change management in organizations through interactive theatre. By collaborating with the theatre in the planning of and the facilitation of the seminar our intention was to utilize their skills in opening up for fruitful and eye-opening discussions. Throughout the vision seminar the participants were engaged with small plays performed by three actors. The discussions would allow the participants to discover new ideas for products, systems and types of collaboration. We invited the train conductors who have participated in our studies as a source of information and as participants in the innovation process. This process allowed for sharing several perspectives on the same situation seen from the perspective of the train operator, the train builder, the supplier of passenger information, the train conductor, researchers and open a discussion about how to change this situation into a preferred one e.g. through new products or services. The themes that we have extracted from the user studies are;

Crosschecking – passengers tend to crosscheck with several train conductors to be sure that they are in the right train. Our assumption is that people do not always need more information. Rather they need to know that the information they have is consistent. This opens up to questions such as: How can we help people to make meaningful links between disparate information sources?

Trust and local knowledge – there is a tendency among certain passengers to trust printed journey plans more than the train conductor, who can have up to 40 years of experience. But train conductors often have the most locally relevant and recently updated knowledge. From this we ask questions such as: How can we ensure that passengers benefit from this expertise?

Special needs – some passengers e.g. hearing impaired people can have special needs such as being informed when the train reaches a certain stop. We all have special needs from time to time. How can we support train conductors in recognizing and supporting the various needs of individual travellers?

The reasoning behind choosing the above themes was that they serve three purposes. Firstly they address issues such as providing service either through people or machines or both. Secondly, the challenges that the passengers meet in our examples are typically unresolved and can be addressed by companies individually or in collaboration. Thirdly, they all convey a story about the imperfect system. No matter how well functioning systems are, there will most likely always be a need for personal service. The question is then how to balance this perspective in the products and services that the seminar participants develop.

Now, two months after the Vision seminar, I have had the opportunity to receive written and oral feedback on the activities primarily from fellow researchers and Dizplay participants. The question is of course – did this seminar fulfill its purpose and how did it make an impact both on the short and on the long run? The latter is of course impossible to give an answer to and I shall focus on the immediate feedback and actions. As stated the purpose was double-sided. To kick-start innovation activities both internally in the company and within the value network. In the following I shall share some insights from the seminar and discuss their implications.

A puzzling value network

The invited key-note speakers included Head of Traffic Information in DSB (Danish State Railways) Tony Bispeskov, Design anthropologist Anna Kirah and Dizplay Senior Manager R&D, Lars Bo Kjøng-Rasmussen. One theme, addressed by all the speakers, was the notion of the experience of the entire journey and that this was a great starting point for innovation. The theme was given different names such as ‘the big solution’ (Tony Bispeskov), ‘the entire process’ (Anna Kirah) and ‘the whole service’ (Lars Bo Kjøng-Rasmussen). All shared the vision of systemic innovation – innovation that is made possible when combining individual companies’ technologies, products and services and from this add value to the experience of train travel. This could include ticket purchasing, passenger information, connecting lines such as busses, on-board services, infotainment services etc. Tony Bispeskov from DSB, which is Denmark’s largest train operator, challenged the audience that consisted of many sub-suppliers by saying;

My advice to suppliers; each supplier is actually very good at what they are doing. So if you are making systems for the train let us say it is monitors for the train – within the train or if you are making monitors for the platforms or traffic information systems of some kind – all of our suppliers are very good at what they are doing – exactly what they are doing. What we are looking for is a big solution. A solution that really focuses on all the data we got – how do we relate all those data and how do we distribute those data afterwards to all those different information channels we’ve got?

This challenge apparently is the Achilles’ heel of this particular industry context. Everybody is good at exactly what they are doing and the same time everybody is aware of that this is not sufficient when it comes to fulfilling the needs in the market. The big solution and the whole experience that both the train operator and passengers are looking for, depends on the ability for both large and small-to-medium sized companies to strategically and practically share the vision and the risk of participatory and collaborative innovation across companies.

The feedback I have received circles around this dilemma. Apparently there are great collaboration opportunities and a willingness to explore new concepts, but who takes the initiative and what are our organizational foundations when it comes to competencies, resources and time? At the same time there is a concern that the complexity of combing technology forecasting, user needs and collaboration across companies, simply is too risky. These concerns are valid and will of course need to be addressed over the coming months. The immediate actions that we (the R&D senior manager and I) have agreed on taking to inform this process are to run a series of concept development workshops within Dizplay. The reasoning behind this is that we cannot and should not wait for a big solution to somehow appear by itself in the shape of a large-scale innovation project across companies. Instead we plan to have three teams of two people focusing on a theme from the user studies. The purpose is to test what results can be achieved within a certain time scale and with fixed resources. The end result will be three prototypes that both addresses user needs from our user studies, that suggests innovative use of current in-house technology and complementary technologies and suggests potential development partners. Our hope is that this project will inform the previous mentioned concerns and help bridge a practical approach with the strategic implications. Moreover the ambition is that the process of making the prototypes will serve as a tangible process tool to free us from the habitual number-focused straitjacket that limits innovation by focusing more on numbers than of purpose and use. Prototypes we believe are a pragmatic and accessible entrepreneurial way of creating interest and commitment with partnering companies and customers. This build-and-show approach to innovation has exceptional aptitudal foundations in this particular company due to the fact that the engineering competencies within the company are both very specialized and diverse. This means that the distance (theoretically) from concept idea to mock-up to prototype is short but so far unutilized. By this approach we believe that we can challenge ourselves e.g. how we perceive innovation – as process, as tangible results and the underlying organizational foundations. With the prototypes we believe we can challenge the value network to commit to collaborating on the development of novel products and services. Before the big solution is decided on we need such internal processes in the organizations of the individual sub-suppliers to play together. In this way the challenge is to share visions, but also to take the first steps towards building the first brick of the puzzle and set an example.

These actions of building prototypes based on user insights could and probably should have been taken two years ago during and after my internship. At that stage, however, the strategic implications were not clear, deciding on earmarking of resources was difficult, the awareness within the value network of this approach to innovation was not present and to put it in popular design anthropological terms the need was still unrecognized by managers within the organization. All of which are preconditions for such a project to succeed and thereby to be addressed by the design anthropologist.

Broadening the notion of users

I hope to have outlined how a design anthropological analysis can be turned into actionable recommendations, how to both practically and strategically work with concept development and influencing the habitus (Bourdieu 2006) and value network traditions through collaborative sense-making of user studies with a broad range of participants in the vision seminar.

Based on the case descriptions and especially the last one which we have just started to understand the outcome of, I want to show how the design anthropologist can serve various purposes in the innovation process of an SME by.

• Facilitating co-ideation sessions based on user insights to help identify strategic implications.
• Creating the argumentation of why the user-driven innovation approach despite its inherent economical, methodological and organizational implications can make sense to a small manufacturing company.
• Broadening managers’ boundaries of how product development can happen within a historically fixed value system and critically co-reflect and spar with management on methods, processes and strategies.
• Facilitating the creation of new value network relations based on field studies with the help of a theatre group and bringing this insight across to concept development teams.
• Creating constructive links between the past, present and the future of the organization through anthropological analysis.
• Broadening the notion of users to include clearly stating and showing their relation and contribution as participants in the innovative process.

The users we as design anthropologists are studying are not limited to current or potential end-users of products or services. Rather I suggest that we as design anthropologists in an SME context expand our roles and apply our skills to understand, involve and facilitate learning and innovation across all participants within the value network. That means studying our own organization, partner and customer relations as well as those end-user groups that will have day-to-day interactions with our products and systems.