empathic facilitation for enhanching customer cetred innovation
TRANSCRIPT
Empathic facilitation for enhancingcustomer-oriented innovation
Tero MontonenPäivi ErikssonHanna Lehtimäki
ICMC2014Bimtech, India
The Fuzzy Front End
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NOVEL IDEAS
CONCEPTSPROTOTYPES
LAUNCHDEVELOPMENT
Traditional product development
CONTEXT OF THE CASE:THE INNOVATION PROCESS
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How to make theFuzzy Front Endmore customer-
oriented?
Innovation andpositive
organizationalscholarship.
THE FOCUS OF OUR INTEREST
What is therelevance ofempathy ininnovation?
EMPATHY IN INNOVATION
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Empathy is theability to take
another person’sperspective andunderstand their
needs. It also meanswillingness to help
others.
Innovation is aboutproviding solutions
for other people’sproblems and
needs
The Innovation Empathy (Inpatia) project
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The aim is to developand test a new
Innovation EmpathyModel in collaboration
with companies
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The Innovation Empathy Model
1st and 2nd rounds of development and testing
Emphasis on doing empathy exercises
•The 1st round: Student innovators were fairly satisfied with theprocess and results (Asikainen et al. 2013), but we were not
•The 2nd round: Company and consultant innovators were notsatisfied wit the process and results, nor were we
Our conclusion:Too little facilitation, too much reliance on empathy exercises to
do the jobHow working with the model should be facilitated?
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3rd and 4th rounds of development and testing
More emphasis on empathic facilitation; initiating and maintaininga dialogue with innovators (with questions, comments, reflectionand feed back).
Both facilitators and company innovators were more satisfied withthe process and results.
Our conclusion:Practice what you preach facilitators need to take innovators astheir customers, and use the same three forms of empathy(cognitive, affective and helping) with both
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CONCLUSIONS FROM THE CASE
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The FFE can bemade morecustomer-orientedwith increasinglevels of empathy
Empathic facilitation(or hosting,convening…) is a keyelement of theInnovation EmpathyModel
Cognitive and affectiveempathy and helping
behaviour are keyingredients of
innovation processes
