Designing for the Knowledge Economy: Accelerating Breakthrough Innovation Through Co-creation

Abstract

The world is becoming increasingly complex while facing problems such as aging societies, energy scarcity and greater demand for health care. These challenges demand systemic solutions based on a holistic, integrative and multidimensional approach. We are simultaneously moving towards a knowledge economy, which requires us to deliver meaningful experiences in ecosystems of interconnected products, services and solutions that evolve over time. No company (or part of it) can understand all aspects of these ecosystems, let alone create meaningful experiences for end-users. Moreover, it is evident that these experiences will be delivered by different players. We therefore need to work towards co-creation. Here we discuss how we are changing the way of working within Philips Design. We introduce broadly our main activities and in detail discuss our Rapid Co-creation (RCC) approach to a dynamic and focused way of progressing ideas into strong propositions and how to accelerate learning by prototyping and validating these propositions.

Keywords:

• co-creation
• innovation
• prototyping
• user-experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Gardien

Paul Gardien is on the Philips Design Board and is responsible for both the strategic development of the global design function and the Design Research & Innovation program. In his strategy role, he has been instrumental in transforming Philips Design from a service unit into a global function inside the company. The Design Research & Innovation program creates new design competences, future visions and new propositions for Philips and has won numerous awards. He has worked in Philips Design in a number of different areas, ranging from product design and user interface design to multimedia and Internet design, both in the professional and consumer domains.

Maarten Rincker

Maarten Rincker is Director at Philips Design and responsible for the exploration, development and implementation of the co-creation approach in Philips. He graduated Industrial Design at the Technical University in Delft and worked in several companies on many different aspects of innovation, such as design, engineering, R&D management, business development studies, program management and innovation management. He transferred to Philips Design in 2007, worked on a wide range of design projects and started to lead the co-creation program in 2012.

Eva Deckers

Eva Deckers is Strategic Design Consultant, Design Research and Innovation at Philips Design. She focuses on the design innovation process and strategic way of working, how to design for product-service systems and academic collaboration. She is domain lead of the Family Care Experience Domain. She graduated (cum laude) in June 2009 at the master course Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. Her graduation project, on how to design for artificial intelligence from an action- and quality-centered perspective, continued in a three-year PhD project that she successfully (cum laude) defended in May 2013.