Strategy development process by ABB




A bit of context 

In the Service Design Breakfast event at Startup Sauna, Laura Invenius from ABB Drivers and Lotta Buss from N2 Nolla presented a case study of strategy creation using service design as a tool. The process shown here is therefore one that was used in a collaboration between an agency and an in-house team. 

What I like about it 

This process like a few others has a start which I particularly like. The process starts with a "brief". In such a moment the team can meet and create:
  1. a common ground to ensure everyone has the same informations, 
  2. a shared language to ensure that people speak of the same things and understand each others
  3. and a common vision to ensure that people work for the same reasons, motivations and goal
Obviously a brief is something that is part of most Service Design and innovation projects even if it's not shown in the process. But making that part of the process visible makes it clear, at least for me, that it's an important part that needs to be planned as carefully as the rest of the process.

This process is the summary of how a project went. Therefore it includes a timeframe. But even for new projects, I think such a rough time frame can be pretty interesting. Obviously as Service Design projects are sometimes a bit messy, exact dates can be more hurtful than helpful. But having a rough estimation that shows how many months each phase takes approximately can help keep the team synchronized. 

Go deeper 

Once more, I found this process on the great blog of the Master’s degree programme in Service Innovation and Design offered by Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Espoo, Finland. The article is called "Service Design as a Tool for Strategy Creation" and was written by Predrag Miskeljin.

The full presentation and the video of the talk where this process was shown can be seen in this slide deck. Additionally, if you want to discover the point of view of the ABB group about the importance of Service Research and Development you can read this article on their global website.