Getting the chance to start from scratch designing a new and effective service, together with a team is something I like best in my job as Service Designer at Liip. Immersing myself in customers’ needs, developing great new ideas, making them tangible with prototypes and getting stimulating feedbacks. These parts are definitely the most inspiring and fun of service design projects.

But the delivery can be a really hard landing.

When working on service design projects, we break open existing silos. We align all the different parts involved in the service to create a better and more efficient service experience. For the delivery of the new service, that can also entail a high degree of complexity. In addition to the hard work of developing concrete solutions, we also have to deal with other challenges. For example, changing the habits and behavior of people or clarifying organizational uncertainties. The search for the right decision-makers and sponsors between the different parts of the company and technical restrictions as further examples. After the thrill of the first creative phases, delivery can mean a really hard landing.

Combining service design with agile methods helps facing the challenges of delivering.

Having worked in both Service Designer and Scrum Master roles in recent years, I tried several ways of combining Service Design with Scrum. My goal is to combine the best of the two ways of working to make this hard landing a little softer. Here are 6 learnings that proved to be very helpful:

1. Use epics and user stories to split the service into more “digestible” pieces.

Everyone probably knows the feeling of not seeing the wood for the trees when you’re standing in front of a wall full of sketches and stickies with ideas. Then it’s very helpful to create a list of epics. In the Scrum world, epics are “a large body of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories” (see Atlassian). In Service Design, epics can help dividing the entire service into smaller pieces. This reduces complexity, and allows dealing within specific and limited challenges of a single epic, rather than the whole. Also, the ability to clarify one epic gives good clues where to start with this big mountain of work.

2. Use the service blueprint as the master to create the backlog.

In software projects we often use user story maps to create epics and user stories. In service design projects, the service blueprint is a very powerful alternative to do user story mapping. Service blueprints help mapping and defining all aspects of the future service - from the targeted experience to internal processes, systems, people, tools, etc involved. This contains a lot of useful information for user stories e.g.

• The actors involved, eg. the different types of users (as personas), different staff people, systems, tools, etc.
• The required functions, as each step of a service blueprint usually contains a number of functions that will be written in the different user stories.
• The purpose of the function, as you can read from each part of the blueprint what is triggered by this step.

After a first version of the user story backlog is created, you can reassign the user stories to the service blueprint. Mapping all the written stories to the blueprint is also great to determine if some user stories have been forgotten. This helps a lot to have a better overview of what to do and how it affects the service experience in the end.

3. Do technical spikes in an early stage of the project in order to make your service more feasible.

If the service contains digital parts, it’s highly recommended to face the technical crack nuts in the project as soon as possible. Scrum provides us with the so called technical spikes - a great chance to dive deeper into different possibilities of solving technical issues of the new service. Strictly timeboxed, they allow developers to explore different technical solutions and suggest the one that fits best. Furthermore the team can discuss the consequences and adapt the service. In order to still create a great experience but also find a feasible way of delivering it.

4. Estimate the business value of the different aspects of the service.

In Scrum, we use business value poker to prioritize user stories. A business value is a relative comparison of the value of different user stories. It helps to prioritize the delivery and to show where the most time and money needs to be invested. This process is also very healthy (and tough!) for service ideas. Knowing how much value each part of the service brings to the whole service vision is very valuable and allows the team focus on what really matters.

You can also do business value poker in combination with an adaption of the six thinking hats method, e.g. one of the team estimates the business value in the hat of the user, one in the hat of the top manager interested in return on investment, and one in the hat of the staff member interested in delivering a service experience that doesn’t mean additional work.

5. Deliver a “Minimum Viable Service” (MVS) before taking care of the rest.

Once we have the user story backlog rooted in the service blueprint and we know which story brings most value to our service vision, we start step by step to deliver the service. In agile software projects, the team starts by producing the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Which means, delivering the smallest amount of features necessary in order to create a valuable, reduced product to users. For services, we are doing the same - creating a “Minimum Viable Service” (MVS). This allows the team developing a first basic version of the service in a short time to market. Delivering results in a early stage of the project is not only motivating the team but also allows continuous learning, adapting and evolving of the service.

6. Work in cross functional, self organised and fully empowered teams.

Scrum teams are self organised and include all skills needed. Without having a hierarchy based system. In a service design setting, many different fields of a company are involved and it’s hard to specify decision makers and people responsible. But that’s the key. Including each and every stakeholder of a whole service in the project is never ending and rarely contributing. Therefore dedicate a small and powerful team of experts involved, give them the full competence to decide and to organise themselves but also the responsibility to deliver value.

Scrum provides great ways to deliver complex service projects.

This blogpost highlights a few aspects of how we manage the challenges of delivering a complex service project. By combining service design with scrum - from the the tools and artifacts to the mindset and the way how teams work together.

Yet, also when following all these aspects, delivering a complex service remains a hard piece of work. But definitely an easier one to handle with the structured and well working delivery methods to bring our ideas to life. Step by step - sprint by sprint.

Talking about improving customer satisfaction, companies often describe the fancy new product they are about to design. The one that is meant to boost customer satisfaction and sales rates like a miracle. But: Is the lack of this new product really the source of unhappy customers?

The biggest obstacles for customer friendliness are (internal) processes.

As a Service Designer at Liip, I do a lot of user research in my projects to find out what makes customers unhappy and how we can solve this. And in most of the cases, I encounter difficult, complicated or nontransparent processes as the biggest pain points. Customers feel, that they have to make too much effort to get the problem solved. Often it doesn’t seem to be clear what to do next. Or they are redirected many times and have to tell the same story over and over again.
These problems typically result from (internal) processes that don’t suit the customers' and employees' needs. And in the meantime they seem to have a big impact on customer satisfaction and the way a customer talks about a company.

Internal processes often seem complex and difficult to change.

In my projects, I experience that many people often don’t dare to touch these processes, although they realise something is not working well. Why? Typically, the problems have many different causes. So a variety of processes and systems are affected and they can’t be assigned to just one department or one person’s responsibility. So who should take care of them? Who feels responsible to change something? This threatens to end up expensive and complicated. Sounds a bit like Pandora’s box, right?

But also the cost of doing nothing is high.

People often forget that doing nothing also is expensive and complicated too. Unhappy customers who spread bad word of mouth or don’t buy again can have a big impact on a company’s revenues. Also, handling customer enquiries costs a lot of money, especially when internal processes to handle them are complicated too. And last but not least - the impact of unhappy employees on a company’s performance is not to be underestimated.

Align the customer experience with what happens behind the scenes.

So in order to improve customer satisfaction, it’s time to pay attention to user friendly and efficient services. It’s about aligning the customer experience with what happens behind the scenes - from internal processes to tools and systems.

But how to get there? And how to not get lost in complexity, especially when the service touches many different processes, systems and departments? Service Design provides us a lot of useful answers to these questions.

How to design user friendly and efficient services - 9 steps

1. Have a clear mission:
   At the beginning of every project, I work on creating a clear mission and a common understanding of where to go together with the team - like a lighthouse that helps to keep orientation on the way.
2. Understand the problem in all its aspects before working on the solution:
   In my opinion, the most important part of creating useful new services is to have a clear and overall understanding of where exactly the issues are - from the user’s needs to the company’s goals and problems. And very important: based on data, not assumptions.
3. Start with the user’s needs, not what tools allow you.
4. Focus in Ideation:
   It requires some discipline to not ideate on whatever seems to be cool. But clearly focusing on solving exactly the problems the team encountered is crucial to not get lost in complexity.
5. Prototype ideas already at early stages:
   The clear common understanding of what the idea consists of is extremely valuable.
6. Test continuously:
   The more feedback we get, the better. It helps to discover if we are on the right or wrong way at an early stage.
7. Implement step by step:
   Implementing one idea after the other helps to get things done and not get lost in too many measures we can’t cope with. Improving services is often about continuously implementing a bunch of measures in order to fulfill one big longterm mission. Agile methods as Scrum perfectly support this way of working during implementation.
8. Think big. But start small:
   Sometimes also small changes are promising.
9. Evolve:
   Projects are never done with the GoLive. They just enter a new phase: the one where our work gets really tested by the mass of users. Every new learning helps us to continuously improve the service.

What are your experiences with designing better services and processes? What was hard, what worked well? Let me know by leaving a comment.

Ayant compris tous les bénéfices business que l’implication des QoQasiens va apporter à la nouvelle plateforme web, il ne peut pas imaginer faire autrement pour la refonte de leur application mobile. Les challenges principaux auxquels fait face l’équipe QoQa sont lancés :

• Challenge 1 : Qu’est ce qui ferait de l’expérience QoQa quelque chose d’exceptionnel ?
• Challenge 2 : Comment créer une expérience d’achat exempte de frustration, mais qui reste excitante et fun ?
• Challenge 3 : Comment peut-on accueillir les nouveaux clients pour qu'ils se sentent vraiment les bienvenus ?
• Challenge 4 : Comment faire grandir la famille QoQa ?

Des Legos pour stimuler la créativité

Afin d’aider QoQa de la manière la plus efficiente qui soit, nous leur avons proposé un workshop de Design Thinking. Cet outil de résolution de problématiques permet de co-créer des solutions créatives et innovantes en impliquant l'utilisateur final.
L’avantage de cette approche est qu’en une ou deux journées, on arrive à : identifier les personnes clés ayant un intérêt pour la solution, définir une ou plusieurs problématiques à traiter, générer des idées innovantes, les prototyper, et les tester concrètement.

Plutôt que de vous faire un résumé de cette journée moi-même, j’ai demandé à Joann de répondre à plusieurs questions pour vous partager son expérience.

Quel était le besoin initial derrière cette volonté de renouveler vos applications mobiles en 2016 ?
L’objectif était simple: nous avons toujours eu comme objectif premier d’offrir aux QoQasiens des applications simples à utiliser, et amusantes. Dès le départ, nous voulions utiliser ce nouveau support non pas comme un canal de plus, mais bien comme une nouvelle opportunité d’être au plus proche de notre Qommunauté. Pourquoi faire une app, si c’est pour offrir exactement les mêmes possibilités que sur le web ? Et en voyant le potentiel ainsi que le trafic - qui devient supérieur au web - nous avons décidé de monter une team en interne et de voir les apps mobiles comme une priorité dans nos réflexions.

Qu’as-tu pensé du Design Thinking de prime abord, lorsqu’on vous a proposé cette méthode comme solution à votre problématique ?
J’ai tout de suite été enthousiaste! Cette méthode collaborative nous a permis d’aller au plus proche des besoins de nos QoQasiens. Cette démarche a pris du temps, notamment l’identification des personas, mais cela nous a fait beaucoup de bien. Notre parti-pris, c’est “On Qiffe tout le monde”: mais même si QoQa ne doit exclure personne, nous avions pas mal d’idées préconçues sur notre public. Pour nous, l’important était donc de pouvoir se retrouver avec des QoQasiens de tous horizons et d’en connaître leurs besoins. C’était vraiment ultra-motivant!

A quoi t’attendais-tu comme résultat de cette journée de workshop (avant de la faire) ?
Dur à dire! Disons que je pensais ressortir de cette journée avec des centaines d’idées mais ma grande interrogation était: “Est-ce que nous pourrons en faire quelque chose de concret ?”

La co-créativité comme élément central de la journée

Comment as-tu sélectionné les personnes qui ont participé au workshop ?
On a d’abord fait une analyse de notre “clientèle”. Même si nous ne sommes pas trop fanas de la démarche, je dois dire que cette analyse nous a fait du bien. Au final, nous avions 6 types distincts et avons trouvé pour chaque persona deux personnes dans notre entourage.

Où as-tu décidé d’effectuer le workshop, et pourquoi ?
Il fallait un lieu qui représente QoQa, qui nous sorte du bureau et qui nous pousse à être créatifs. Ce n’était pas considéré comme une journée de travail, mais comme une journée de détente, de fun et d’éclate. Nous avons donc décidé d’aller au bar TA CAVE à Lausanne, un lieu communautaire et atypique que nous avons pu privatiser une journée. Bons vins, bonne bouffe, super chaleureux… C’était le reflet parfait de notre philosophie!

Comment s’est déroulée la journée ? Qu’est-ce qui t’a surpris ou déçu ?
Hyper bien, à certains moments je pensais halluciner. Surtout quand j’ai compris que nous allions travailler avec des Legos! Mais en fait l’ambiance super créative était vraiment motivante. Ce workshop a même créé des nouvelles amitiés! Des idées un peu folles en sont ressorties, mais elles répondaient toutes à un réel besoin. Les échanges ont permis de trouver des solutions créatives, et de répondre à chaque persona et ses propres problématiques. Donc autant vous dire que nos apps mobiles sont aujourd’hui juste le début d’une belle aventure!

Quels impacts a eu cette journée de workshop sur la stratégie digitale de QoQa pour les apps mobiles (ou web/digital plus globalement) ?
Nos apps mobiles sont considérées comme un nouveau canal et non pas un simple device qui nous permet de faire la même chose que sur la version web. Cette journée nous a permis de valider — ou pas — nos prochains développements. Et notre stratégie reste simple, à savoir répondre aux besoins de nos QoQasiens et donc continuer à les impliquer dans nos futures réflexions.

Concrètement, quels sont les projets innovants qui ont déjà été implémentés — ou qui vont être implémentés (tu nous donnes un petit teaser sur la semaine anniversaire ?)
Je peux difficilement parler de nouvelles features. Mais par contre, je peux vous dire que tous les aspects communautaires seront bientôt dans nos apps mobiles. Je parle des Qdéfis, des sondages, des chasses au trésor, etc. Nous avons également décidé de passer plus de temps pour de la R&D afin de tester des idées résultantes du workshop, et soyez sûr que de belles choses se préparent pour 2018… La réalité augmentée nous intéresse beaucoup !

Un prototype répondant à une problématique concrète

À quelle société en Suisse romande recommanderais-tu ce type de workshop, et pour répondre à quel problème ?
À toutes les boîtes qui ont besoin d’évoluer et d’écouter leurs clients. Nous vivons une période étrange avec cette transformation digitale… Je pense que c’est le bon moment pour se poser les bonnes questions. Car l’objectif ne sera pas de juste numériser, de faire un site web ou une app, mais bien de répondre à un vrai besoin et de se transformer pour évoluer dans le bon sens.

Pourquoi as-tu fais confiance à Liip plutôt qu’à une société de consulting en stratégie qui aurait pu proposer le même type de workshop ?
Car vous êtes des pointures, et en plus vous mettez l’ambiance aux apéros !

Vous pouvez retrouver un résumé vidéo de ce workshop de Design Thinking QoQa qui retranscrit bien l’ambiance de cette journée d’idéation.

Chez Liip, on adore cette énergie créative et collaborative qui ressort de chaque workshop de Design Thinking. C’est grisant de voir des idées innovantes qui fusent et prennent forme grâce à un judicieux mélange de personnes du “business” et d’utilisateurs réels venant d’horizons différents.

Pour le client ou la marque concernée, c’est à chaque fois le même refrain qu’on entend en sortant du workshop : “On a enfin pu prendre le besoin à sa source, et se reconnecter avec nos clients finaux dans la vraie vie (vs. sur nos Analytics) !”

When preparing a design thinking workshop for my colleagues, I realised that we do practice design thinking everyday as designer but often our clients don’t realise it. One of the reason, is that we don’t extensively sell our service under the name of design thinking. But it is the foundation of every step of our work. Design thinking is a method with many tools and techniques. It is often used in user experience, customer experience and service design as an output.

No matter they are small or big project, we keep the end users in the center of the solution for every project. As user experience designers, we apply these tools and techniques to projects depend on the status and the type of work. In other words, we are using design thinking method at liip without people realise it because it is the baseline in order to create great user experience.

You don’t know what to solve? Then, you are right on the track.

Business problems are complex and difficult, and often are hard to explain. It seems that there is no right solutions for them. It can be hard to know where to start and what to solve. Don’t panic! That’s a good time to start!

The discovery phase 1

We start with a discovery phase, when we empathise with the users through interviews and observation. When people are involved in a project or business for a long time, often they think that they know their customers well. However market trend changes, so do people’s preferences and lifestyle. It is important to update time to time, and reflect on what has impacted our customers and how they feel.
By analysing discovery phase, we can collect insights and problematic issues where we can bring to the next step, “defining a problem”.

Writing a good problem statement shapes to the right ideas.

Based on the outcome of discovery phase, we can gather insights. While analysing the insights we can see a patterns and critical topics in the area. It’s time to find focus area by identifying problem statement. We start with question; how might we…… This shouldn’t be too small or too broad. We should give some space for creativity.

• A bad example is: How might we redesign a hotel booking app for everyone to reserve accommodation. (The solution is already provided and for everyone is too broad)
• A good example is: How might we redesign booking process for digital savvy users to integrate seamlessly in their devices. (It gives a room to explore and areas to focus)

Design thinking will show you the way how to reach to the solution!

We are living in the era when tons of information and digital solutions are available. They should be structured easy to use rather than consuming our precious time. User centered design is essential for complex problems, hence Design Thinking method is widely used in many industries.
Common mistakes are often jumping into solution quickly. We should not discuss from a feature list but questioning what is the insight and what would be the meaningful solution. In this way we can pave the way to the right direction and we will get there at the end.

In my last blog post, we realized that companies are faced with an ambiguous situation, between innovation and users loyalty. Meanwhile users want  cutting the edge experiences and dislike learning news things.

1: Deal with these bad feelings concerning change in companies

I have bad news. If your company is struggling at innovating, maybe it is because it is excellent at killing good innovation ideas. Big companies are expected to innovate, but managing people in such companies just freak out at the simple idea of dealing with edgy ideas. Nobody wants to be the ones who brought a massive failure in the history of the product, or worse, in the collective memory of people about the company. Managing people are often more afraid of the negative consequences of their actions than interested by the very exciting potential behind this very original idea. Innovation seems risky, and can lead to failures.

No matter how careful you act, you never know how your new product will be received. There is always a risk and failure is an option.The risk shouldn't prevent you from innovating. Remember, only the companies that innovate survive. There is more to lose at doing nothing than at failing. Ask Kodak if they would still do the same if they were given a second chance to survive.

Help your decision takers with an environment where they can actually be aware of the whole uncertainty of each proposition. Put them in a danger free environment and allow them to be comfortable with uncertainty and to tolerate the unknown that comes with creative ideas, as it's a trainable skill, and a mandatory one to success.

Create an environment prone to innovation

Invite the management to test these ideas, and assure them that they can safely try and fail until they succeed. And invite them to fail as fast as possible. After each failure, analyze what you have, be it data, testimonials, learn from it, adapt, and iterate on your product, and fail again, and learn and modify and fail again and again.

Thomas Edison tested 6 000 different natural substances to create his first electric light bulb. He failed thousands of times at finding the proper elements to build his light bulb. How many times did you fail?

Failing helps getting closer, little by little.

As long as a company does not accept the risk of failing, it will miss the benefits of succeeding. Once your company is really ok with taking those risks, and once you provide a favorable environment to innovation to your teams, then you can go to the next step and ask user's participation.

2. Learn about your users and their resistance to changes

As human beings, your users have a set of characteristics commonly shared, no matter where they come from in the world, no matter why they use your product, no matter which language they speak. They can have feelings, and they also have memory. This sounds dramatic I know…

Understand the global cognitive economy of the human being

Learning costs (a lot of) energy. You have to actively put your attention into something new, and try to understand how it works, what you have to do and when you have to do it. We do this to be able to react quickly during the following exposure “ ok to launch the song I just have to tap here once”

What happens when we suddenly realize that what we learned _the hard way _is not working anymore? The connexions that occurred in our brains are obsolete, and the whole energy invested in this old wiring is wasted. We have to learn a know how again. Either we accept it, either we struggle.

When a feature is abandoned, or modified, in a software, the users have to readapt to it, or find alternative ways, or worse, alternative softwares to be able to do it the old way. Some will shout at you on social networks, and will spend X times the amount of energy that would have been sufficient to learn the new way, just not to adapt. And sometimes features are abandoned because of new innovative features, or just because they are almost never used.

Unfortunately, we tend to minimize energy expenses, and we try to save our energy. If we have to learn something new, a new way to do, then we basically will behave as if we were suddenly endangered. Change is a very good reason to freak out for many persons. May it be for silly things or for deep moves, users will complain , this is called resistance to change.

Habits have a tough life. You won't let users abandon easily their habits, just because you suggest them to do so with a new feature. If you want massive adoption of your product / feature / service by the users, you have to prove them that it it worth changing. Why would they abandon their beloved product for yours?

Time is counted, and so is everyone's attention span. If you cannot demonstrate the benefits of this new product / feature simply, in just one minute, then the risk is high that your whole product or feature will be ignored.

3. Innovate with your users thanks to Design Thinking.

As mentioned, users know parts or even your whole product, and know things you should improve. It's a pretty good start. But it's not enough. You should gather your users' opinion.

Question your users

Put them together in groups, in a cool and calm place, and invite them to solve your design problems. “How might we __ “ or  “How can we become the best at  __ “  “How might we onboard new users so they feel part of our community” “How might we remove any frustration on our customer's side”…

Make as many groups of users as you want and let them choose a design challenge. Be sure there are some challenges left, so that they feel in control, and not forced to deal with something they did not choose.

Invite them to throw a lot of ideas, without any judgement on quality. Focus on quantity first. Once you have one hundred ideas, abandon the ones you really dislike (not financially healthy, or damaging for the company's reputation), cluster the ideas into themes, and ask your groups to select one theme they want to pitch to the other groups.

100 Post-it challenge

Start prototyping

Once the theme is selected, and the feedbacks from other groups are taken into account, start prototyping! Give them big paper leaves, post its, ropes, legos, cutters, wooden sticks, wool, duct tape, corks, anything that can help building something quickly.

Even very abstract prototypes can help you communicate your ideas to innovate.

Listen to your users' ideas

Let them express all the crazy ideas they have in their theme, and then let them pitch, take feedback, iterate, and slowly evolve to something more feasible.

And Voilà!! you get brilliant ideas on different subjects for your product, almost all feasible now. You still have to prioritize, begin fine tuning design, do user testing sessions, develop, do user testing sessions again on the ready to go live product / feature / service.

Take feedback and adapt

When arriving at this point, you minimize your risks, and only propose the new features / products to a limited and representative sample of your users. You take feedbacks, adapt, retest, and then only you push it to the masses.

To conclude

UX can support changes with in three main way:

• Give the companies the “Fail Fast” attitude / environment they need to dare to innovate
• Learn from your users, why they refuse change, what would motivate them to follow you
• Involve you users in your innovation process thanks to Design Thinking activities

Once you have followed these advices, my final tip is to invest even more effort on User's onboarding for the new product / feature. Remember, if the user doesn't get it in one minute, he will leave and nobody wants this to happen!

Lift Basel, taking place from 29-30 October 2015, the not-to-be-missed conference connecting Life Sciences and Technology, had one clear message: It is time to innovate and think differently for all stakeholders in order to address the future of health.

The Conference's Programme and Aim

Basel has a long standing tradition of the pharmaceutical industry. Not only in Switzerland, but Europe wide. So, no coincidence that the Lift Conference on Life Sciences and Technology (2nd edition) takes place in this great city.

It is a conference where entrepreneurs, innovators and long standing business connoisseurs meet to discuss the new developments, get to know new start ups, brainstorm on innovative solutions of current challenges.

Thanks very much to the organizers of this conference. It was highly fascinating and a new edition is mandatory. The networking and exchange of ideas was inspiring!

This year's program covered topics such as: food, surgery, open data, synthetic biology, relation of doctors & patients, and ageing. Speakers came from all sorts of institutions: academia, cantonal hospitals, start ups from all over the world.

BUT: Why are our big pharmaceutical industries not among the innovators?

Astonishingly, the big absentees in the speakers' list were the major pharmaceutical industries of Basel (Roche, Novartis, Actelion). While some of their representatives did attend the conference, only one of them (Novozymes) contributed to the talks (and by the way, congratulations. Novozymes approach of citizen science was really inspiring).

It is widely acknowledged that any company neglecting today's development of technologies and not introducing it into their business, may risk its own future.

So, why are our biggest pharmaceutical industries not contributing to a conference where a big part of their future is discussed? Do they have nothing to show? What is it that keeps them from being big players at the conjunction of life sciences and technology in the future?

Reasons for their absence

The reasons why the big players are not among the innovators are manyfold. Here a few which I see as crucial.

1. Hierarchies:

Many pharmaceutical and major FMCG companies have become immensely big; often worldwide. In order to organize themselves they have built up complicated decision processes and very steep hierarchies. Salaries and bonuses are attached to these hierarchies. But hierarchies and decisions that take long kill innovation. As we know from the Lean Startup (Eric Ries), innovation and great ideas need more freedom. They need cross functional teams, integration of end-users, a “the more you fail, the more we learn”-culture and a strategic openness to exchange with other inventors. But in a stiff hierarchy with secrecy perceived as competitive advantage, there are very few incentives to innovation. People at lower levels have a lot of expertise and often great ideas, but they do not find valuable reasons why they should share it. For example: “Why should I mention my great idea if then my boss goes advertise it and gets all the bonus for it?” Or: “Why should I even do that? I risk of exposing myself and maybe even getting more work.”

2. Fear of cannibalization

What if there is an invention within the company that actually competes with an already existing cash cow? The cash cow may see its end of life coming at a very far horizon, but still it is a cash cow and the ROI is not reached yet. In this case, it takes a lot of courage for people within a company to defend the new product that could cannibalize that cash cow. I assume most people do not dare to do so. The short term profit of milking the cash cow is much easier than advocating for a new idea, that may be only at prototype level and with long term – and thus only probable – profit.

And what is the lesson out of this fear?

Some companies learn and try to solve the problem via spin-offs or clearly separated innovation teams that have different rights within a company.

Others haven't learnt and lost market share because in the meanwhile start-ups built these innovative products. dollarshave.com took 10% of the US market share within a year. I assume a development that for example Gillette did take note of and feel.

3. Improve vs. innovate

Developments in academia, start-ups and product development methodologies have shown one important development: innovations are a result of cooperation among an inter-disciplinary, cross-functional team. Many workshops, including the one from Liip, built upon one of these methodologies called “Design Thinking” where inter-disciplinarity and empathizing with the end-consumer is core to any good product.

Design Thinking Methodology – Used for Innovating @Liip

Today's world can just not be captured anymore by one single discipline. One single discipline, by nature of its work, only has the goal to improve a product in order to squeeze an already existing market. But inter-disciplinary innovations, they make combinations of expertise not seen so far and finally address markets that do not exist yet. Naturally, these yet to be built markets have much more potential.

As we have seen in the conference, the combination of life sciences and technology is such a combination. So far it is a combination that only start-ups make (with a few exceptions like Novozymes). Big players in these industries finally should understand that they have to change their thinking. They have to be willing to invest into cooperation with other fields, to observe their end-consumers, to stop the secrecy about their ideas and to admit that improvement of products only is not sustainable with a long-term view of a digitalized world.

(By the way – just for those that now mention the harsh legal conditions of the pharmaceutical industry: In many cases, these products do not have to go through a tough licensing procedure since the regulations have not even been created yet.)

Wake up and change

Marcel Salathé, PhD, held the closing speech. Having studied and worked at ETH and Stanford and now being appointed at EPFL, he incorporates the combination of informatics and life sciences. And he has told all participants very frankly: Europe needs to watch out. Most ground-breaking digital innovations today come from the United States and they are taking over the world. They do not care about legal conditions (see Uber or Airbnb) but rather innovate and then negotiate with stakeholders.

So, summarizing this conference, we should take away the following: If Europe does not want to become a dust bin of formerly successful health corporations, we need to build a soil of innovation through technology by being demanding towards ourselves, asking for the best, exchange knowledge, share learnings and change company cultures.

Build the life sciences hub – NOW!

And, consequently, this is a recommendation sent out to our big pharmaceutical companies with HQs in Basel. Even though you might feel very sure in your market position, let me say this: the innovation curve between life sciences and technology has just started and is now at its exponential take off. You need to take this serious, critically put yourself into question and decide very quickly how you want to contribute in order to hop on. Get together with technological partners and make a culture shift. In short: Convince yourself to move forward NOW and start building the Life Sciences Hub in Europe.