Supporting designers at Philips Design: A designer centric approach to knowledge sharing

Supporting designers at Philips Design: A designer centric approach to knowledge sharing

Nagtzaam, H.A.H.

Daalhuizen, J.J. (mentor)
Timmer, R. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

PIM - DM

master strategic product design

2011-06-23

The goal of this study is to improve design support for designers at Philips Design. Philips Design is organized to be completely ‘people centric’: their products fully aim to fulfill user needs and wishes. To achieve this, the employees are supported by the High Design Process. It enables them to do people centric innovation for the Business. This study is ‘designer centric’; it aims to derive the needs and experiences of the designers based on a theoretical model and a phenomenological study. The findings of this study show that improving support for designers will not be achieved by improving the High Design Process, but rather by improving the contextual support. Based on these findings, six opportunities for Philips Design are devised amongst which improving knowledge sharing is the most beneficial in the context of this project. Knowledge sharing is in fact a coupled action of sending (answering) and receiving (asking), if one of two fails, sharing fails. In a collaborative workshop the designers indicated that the two main barriers for sending are motivational of nature: there is no passion for sharing; there is no clear reward system for sharing. The two most important barriers for receiving are operational: it is difficult to know who knows what; there is not enough time to engage in sharing. To tackle these four barriers both motivational and operational, knowledge sharing should become embedded in the ways of working: the Philips Design sharing culture needs to change. To change the knowledge sharing culture, an eight step roadmap is designed which builds on the employees daily routines, on existing solutions and on personal relationships. The roadmap introduces small steps that together will nudge the existing mentality into a knowledge sharing culture. The first two steps of this roadmap introduce small tweaks of fully embraced technology within Philips Design. These steps have been further developed to an operational level to enable testing. The test indicates that the end users perceive the solutions to be a helpful and – more important so – seem to like implementing them. The participants’ suggestions are leveraged into a redesign, further enhancing the efficiency and usability. Philips Design is working hard to implement knowledge management into the organization in the near future. The solutions posed for knowledge sharing in this project contribute to this activity and strengthen the overall proposition. Interest is shown by key stakeholders for knowledge management deployment, to implement certain solutions of this project in the Philips Design organization.

Knowledge
Sharing
Management
Design
Thinking
Methodology
People centric
Organizational culture

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:39f55a13-2788-4b11-908a-4d25209515a6

2012-06-23

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Nagtzaam, H.A.H.