Managing Mobile Innovation

Mobile products and services are a vital part of everyday life for billions of people across the world. As one of the world’s largest mobile technology companies (and one of the world’s most valuable brands,) our client understands that it needs to keep its portfolio focused on people in order to keep its pole position.

Moving beyond the device

Engine have been working with the company’s largest design teams over the past 18 months to help them design, implement, evaluate and iterate a people focused innovation process. This process is now being used across their largest business group to deliver concepts for the mobile experiences that they will bring to market over the next 5 years. 

Working across the organisation
From the outset our client understood that the key to developing a usable, practical and inspiring innovation process was to work collaboratively across the organisation.

To begin with we worked with experts from across the organisation’s broad (and global) networks to understand who the key contributors from outside the design teams needed to be, and how they should interface with the process to ground the ideas in practical, up to the minute intelligence.

Incorporating global insights
We then helped the teams to understand how they identify and integrate the right consumer insights into their innovation thinking. We worked with designers to help them develop methodologies to extract the most valuable and targeted observations from key consumers in key regions.

Being creative with process documentation

We then assisted the teams in translating the research insights into useable and focussed briefs for the experience designers centred on what really matters; people and their lives.

Connecting through to product creation
Following this, the innovation process fanned out to help the larger teams of multi disciplinary designers manage their work as they developed integrated portfolios of concepts, ideas and innovations in response to the briefs.

The key to managing the collaborative, iterative process of designing the innovation process was effective and intuitive documentation. As part of this Engine facilitated regular fortnightly meetings with key stakeholders to ensure that everyone was working from the same page at the same pace. We developed a simple process documentation format that everyone could contribute to, and worked with a communication agency to ensure that all inputs and outputs were accessible and carefully archived. The innovation process is currently undergoing ISO9001 certification as part of a broader product creation process assessment.

Process: Where you are vs. where you want to be
Our work with the company is not finished. Like any process development, developing innovation processes should always be seen as an ongoing project. We’re currently working with them to evaluate the outputs and evolve the process for subsequent rounds of innovation, so that they can continue to provide the most innovative and relevant mobile experiences well into the future.