Talk
Designing for open innovation
Friday, June 10
11:15 – 12:00
Lecture Room
Tzachi Toledo
Strategy Consultant, Designit
One of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies approached us with the challenge of coming up with innovative solutions for the treatment and management of Psoriasis.
Rather than going through a traditional process of strategy followed by design of concepts, we decided to outsource the ideation and channel our design efforts to create an open platform for innovation, effectively harvesting ideas from external innovation agents.
And so, the design challenge became about making all of the disease information and research accessible to people seeing it for the first time. We needed to be able to illustrate all of the disease insights and challenges and create an information delivery mechanism that would transfer knowledge in a rapid and effective way, but would also be inspiring and drive for ground breaking and relevant ideas.
The solution was an open innovation kit, a physical box with different types of cards, canvases and prototyping tools inside. We then utilized the kit in events all over the world - a hackathon in Tel Aviv, an event for the client employees in Berlin and a rapid ideation station at TEDMED in Palm Springs. With diverse participants from various disciplines, backgrounds and ages, we managed to collect over 70 different viable concepts.
Leveraging on the wisdom of crowds, we were able to prioritize the ideas, select the ones most relevant and take them to the next stage of development.
The client, although initially sceptic regarding the process, was so pleased with the outcome that they decided they would like to go through the same process for 2 other therapeutic areas.