From Necessity to Fun: Implementing User Centered Design and Brand Driven Innovation at a business to business software provider

From Necessity to Fun: Implementing User Centered Design and Brand Driven Innovation at a business to business software provider

Sosinowska, A.

Buijs, J.A. (mentor)
Van der Meer, J.D. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Master of Science Strategic Product Design

2012-08-16

For almost all companies it is very obvious that in order to survive and grow they need to innovate, whether the innovation concerns their product, market or the way they do things. The paradox of innovation is that on one hand the companies want to innovate (since they know it is necessary) on the other they want to do things they are used to do and naturally prefer to relay on the safe recipes that worked in the past. Since the innovation process significantly differs from regular business it requires different mindset of the whole organization. Regular business is all about developing and selling one (or more) unique idea(s) and avoiding all kinds of risks, while innovation is all about out-of-the-box thinking, breaking the rules, risk taking and above of all producing ideas and throwing most of them away. The last is in general in contradiction to operational effectiveness; it is seems simply throwing money and effort away. Innovation is also stepping out of the comfort zone, what is usually associated with a painful and stressful situation since it is an unknown territory that is to been entered and it is difficult to predict what is to be expected. Organizations that are to innovate are also stepping out of their comfort zone of known routines and working recipes, often observed reaction is resistance and falling back on known routines. The innovation process should however be a fun and rewarding process in order for it to be successful. The reward should be not only in the profit the company makes or a prospect of domination on the market but also the learning process that the organization and its employees go through. For my graduation project I have chosen to introduce the approach that changed the innovation from a painful and necessary business to a fun and rewarding process at software provider for the business-to-business market. In this report of my graduation project the process of introducing different techniques of user research and creative problem solving to the company can be found. Further a proposal of a User Centered Design Toolkit meant to help the company to be able to do user research that results in gaining of a deep knowledge of the use needs as well as help the company employees to work together is shown.

Design
User Centered Design
Innovation
Brand Driven Innovation
Business to Business
Software

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:005bcd14-474c-4a70-9691-a63ce1207ac5

2013-08-16

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2012 Sosinowska, A.