Professor Eddie Obeng – the man behind the monetisation of MSN, the innovation burst at Cadbury's and the turn-around of Rolls Royce motor cars – introduces some principles of design-led innovation.
The Pentacle Virtual Business School's Director of Learning was joined on stage at the Redesigning Business Summit 2010 by Richard Seymour, founder and Director of Seymourpowell design consultancy; David Kester, Chief Executive of the Design Council and Bonnie Dean, Senior Adviser, Quantum Property Partnership, SPark – Bristol and Bath Science Park.
Read the transcript below.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Thank you very much, and thanks for the applause at the start. I'm really delighted to be here and also to see so many faces I recognise in the audience. I guess if I was just to briefly introduce myself, I only have probably two claims to fame. One is you remember yesterday we were talking about disruptors and people making trouble? I did that in the business world by setting up a virtual business school, the first one, about 15 years ago. What happened is they switched off the electric fencing at the school where I used to teach and I escaped and I set this thing up, and I started rewriting the rules around business management.
The second claim to fame which is why I'm here, and the really important one, is I'm actually a counsellor on the Design Council, which for me is absolutely fabulous because I get a chance to interact with lots of people helping to reshape the UK through innovation and design, and that’s what we want to do in this session of ours.
Now, yesterday I was listening – because I turned up a bit late, I missed the early morning sessions – at lunchtime people were telling me that the key messages were about things like explaining the user journey and making sure that you collaborated. Am I in the right place? Did you do this stuff yesterday? You're not into it? You're not into it? I love this. We have a discussion about how important it is to involve people, to have a dialogue, and I say what do you think, and everyone goes...
Are we okay for the dialogue? Just shout out if you’ve got an answer. I'll repeat it then you don’t need to get the mic, so... Is that right? I'm supposed to do some collaborative alliance based stuff. Am I right?
Audience in unison
Yes.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Yes! Okay, so I learnt my lesson well, and so rather than just me turning up here to come and help you I decided I would bring some of my friends from the Design Council. And so what I did was I co-opted them in and they weren’t expecting it, so they're here under duress, but really, they're friends and I forced them to do it. So I want to introduce them onto the stage and I hope you'll give them a lovely welcome as they come up.
The first person I'd like to introduce is Richard Seymour. Richard, do you want to come up here? Richard I'm sure all of you know. Brilliant, thank you. Richard, you will not realise this, probably lives in your homes. Okay, you don’t know it, but he's created and invented so many products, probably everything from the kettle which you use through to the soap which you bath with, through all sorts of things over his 30 years as a leading designer, that you probably touch him every single day but without realising it, okay. So this is Richard Seymour and he's going to help us to look a little bit around the role of a designer in driving through innovation.
The second friend I managed to twist an arm of is David Kester. David, do you want to come and join us? David’s the CEO of the Design Council. He kicked off the session this morning. If you don’t understand what he does, basically what the Design Council has managed to do is create a space which enables the UK as a whole to think strategically and also get on and do things, and the doing is through all sorts of projects, like Alan Livingstone at the back there does things around changing a whole community by getting them to engage with design. The whole area in which the Government thinks about how we can use innovation. We're being asked all sorts of strange things which David is leading which you wouldn’t have thought of. How do you design crime out of things? How do you redesign the justice system? These aren’t traditional questions, and David had led the organisation to the point where it can start to answer those sorts of questions. So that’s David.
The third friend I've pulled up is Bonnie Dean. Bonnie has been brilliant in helping us understand how to commercialise ideas and bringing them to market. She’s led and driven things like – you have heard of the Designing Demand programme. Bonnie’s strength is in creating things. At the moment she's actually creating a science park in the South West. Her background is from leading listed companies, driving through innovation all the way through her career.
So, those are my friends and I hope that you'll enjoy our master class. If I sort of take us forward I'll tell you what the journey is. This is also something we're supposed to do, isn’t it? User centred journey customer stuff? Is that right? Am I in the right place?
Audience in unison
Yes.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Okay. So this is what we're going to do. We're going to go through chapters with you. The first one is about leading innovation. Not design, leading innovation – and you heard earlier about Sir George Cox’s definition of innovation. We're going to build on that.
Then we're going to move into looking at what we call Industrial Judo. How do you use design as part of innovation to overthrow what’s been there? And then we're going to talk about something really weird; a safe space. Why do you need a safe space, for goodness sake? Well, we'll try and help you understand that and maybe you can figure out how you can use that as well. Then we’ll look at how you actually translate ideas rather than just having the ideas and having great thoughts and all that, how do you make business something which is useful? And then finally we're going to talk about trying to make it absolutely real – so that’s the journey we're going on.
The other thing I learned also, apart from setting the journey, was that it’s also important to anticipate people’s expectations. As I understood this morning market research is no longer allowed. You actually have to go out and talk to the people. Am I right? So when I do the market research I thought that you'd have requirements from this session around things like how to make things happen, a bit of a framework, so you can take it away and describe it to people, and you probably didn’t want any more stories about Apple, am I right? That was what I put together from my market research.
I now have the people, so I'm going to ask you to do something very fast, at very high speed. You need to turn to the two or three people you're sitting next to and I want you to have a quick conversation about – 'Yes, we’d really like to learn this for the next hour or so!' Oh no, don’t... for goodness sake, don’t do that. Just have a quick chat about what you want and what you don’t want. I'll take one or two requests, that’s about it, and then we'll fire into the hour of the master class. You have 30 seconds, so you’ve got to be pretty quick in talking to people and coming to some agreement and throwing it out. Your 30 seconds have started. Action. Go.
And nine, and eight, and seven, and six and five and four and three and two... okay, your time’s up. Let's go. Just one or two requests, anything you want my friends and I to try and address as we go though the session, just two quick requests. Say it and I'll repeat it.
Audience member 1
How to overcome inertia in a large organisation.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
How to overcome inertia in a large organisation. I'm assuming that’s a hoax? Okay, how to overcome..., and another one?
Audience member 2
I'd like to know what your perspective would be, how to deal with it when my users do not want to be where they are, do not want to be involved, and don’t want to engage with us.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
So wait, you're innovating and everybody hates it, but you're going to do to anyway?
Audience member 2
Innovating around a group of people that really don’t want to be in the environment they're in, but they have no choice.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
You're not on about prisoners again, are you? Prisoner innovation?
Audience member 2
No, secure mental health.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Got it. Okay, so it’s something like that, so innovate without users. Got it. Great. Maybe one more for... too late. You were too slow. You know, yesterday we talked about speed and greed and feed and something like that, am I right? The guy at the back, he was the speedy one. Go for it.
Audience member 3
Does one design process fit all, or do you have to continually redesign design journeys?
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Got it. Okay great. Anything you don’t want us to do? Anything off the list? Avoid, avoid?
Audience member 4
No more case studies.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
No more... you just wrecked my whole session, so I'll list that. Somebody spoke but I'm not user-centred, therefore... I'm going to put you on case studies and I'll write in. Okay, anything else you want us to avoid? That’s it? Okay great. So, apart from the lack of case studies... I'm sorry guys. Okay, when we get to the case study bit, cover your ears.
Okay good. Apart from that bit, I would want to start us off on our journey and I want to start with something I think you might enjoy, which are my favourite statistics, so I'll share them with you if it’s okay. Let's go for that. That’s one of them. This is another one. Then there's this one here over here, and this one here. Do you like them?
Oh, sorry about that. I'm obviously standing too far away, so let's go for one in 100,000. Okay, and this one here was... good. You like them? Should we carry on? Good. Okay. You want to know what they mean, don’t you? Okay, I'll let you in on the secret.
I love this drive towards innovation. And when you hear people talk about innovation and rethinking and so on, it sounds so exciting and so yes, let's get on and do it! The bad news is the stats are a bit weird. Do you know what this number here represents? This is basically the number of projects which set out to do something and actually roughly do what they thought they were going to do. Are you with me?
Now apparently the average project, in the UK anyway, is the equivalent of sending a family of five from London to New York planning to spend 1,700. Are you with me? A family of five. The average project looks like this; they actually end up in Quito, Ecuador. It costs them 2,200 and they leave two of the children behind. The chances of success are poor.
Let's do another one. This one here is the number you get if you go into Google and you type in innovation change consultants; 7.1 million people happy to help you. Three hundred and sixty six thousand is the number of books on Amazon around creativity and innovation.
Do you know what this number here is? Survey it in your own organisations. It’s the number of ideas people have which actually translate into something which is making money for real in the market two years after you think you’ve made it happen: One in 100,000. If you know don’t believe me, think about it. How many ideas do you have which you write down, which you tell somebody else, which you get resources for which you then turn into an activity, which you then drive into your organisation, which you then scale up, which you then take to market, which actually works and helps you? The moment you start thinking about, it each time you say one in ten you're down to your 100,000. I.e. what I'm trying to say is innovation sounds great, but it’s not so easy. It’s not just going to come out of a manual. Am I giving you too hard a time? Should I keep going? I've depressed them...
Okay, the second thing which I want to share with you which is also quite strange is, because of the crisis everyone thinks innovation is 'It' to solve their organisational issues. It’s funny, when people talk about this crisis it’s almost if we haven’t had one. I'm sure we had the Asian crisis. I'm sure we had the Dotcom boom... well, bust. Have we had these things around the world at different stages? Everyone says everything’s growing in Asia. Yes, but when it was crashing in Asia we were going 'Yes, we're rich!'
Are you with me? Do you understand what's going on? It’s not an event. It’s not a specific thing. There's something else going on. What I want to do is open that issue for you and once you see it we'll be able to put innovation in a much stronger context and then we will be able to stick design traits in the middle of it.
What I wanted to share with you, a little story, a little personal story. The reason I got into what I was doing was... one of the big things that changed me was, do you remember there used to be a fashion for these things called magic eye pictures? You remember those books with lots and lots of different dots – about 15, 20 years ago – and when you looked at them you sort of did that sort of thing, and all of a sudden an image would emerge? Do you remember that stuff? I could never see these things. People were walking around going, 'Ooh, it’s a cat,' or 'That one’s a house,' and they were all so excited about these things.
I thought they were boring. I couldn’t see anything. 'Oh, rubbish!' And then I went in to visit a client in Hammersmith and I was walking back to the car, and as I was walking I walked past this shop window, and in the shop window there was one of these pictures, a huge one. I looked up at it and was just dots. I thought boring, silly thing. Then I looked up at it again, and as I looked up the second time I suddenly noticed a man had emerged out of it leaning towards me, and I leapt into the road to get away from him, and was narrowly missed by a taxi.
That’s not the important part of the story. Well it is, sort of, but I leapt back onto the pavement and looked back at it and I thought, 'Oh my goodness, look at that.' When I thought it was dots and it was boring I was just going to walk past. The moment I thought it was somebody coming to grab me I almost jumped into the road and I almost got run over. So which is the correct image? You don’t do interactive very well, do you?
Audience member 5
Both.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Both? Okay, so which reaction should I really have?
Audience member 5
The second one.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
The second one? Why? Why not the first one? If I can see both I can choose. If all I can see is the dots I have no choice. If all I can see is the second one I can't understand why people think it’s boring.
Look, what's happened to us with this crunch is not a very big thing. It’s just an event. It’s an event which is one of many within a huge spectrum of other events. Let me try and describe what I mean. If this is now and this is the past and we stick about 20 years between the two of them, okay? One thing which is really clear is that there are more people on the planet. They're all crammed into cities. We heard about the speed with which cities are being built, and airports and so on. More than 40% of them are now crammed in together. 40% of them access the internet every day through cyberspace. Are you with me? Loads of people, so the things which are driving change, the density, the interaction of human beings is rising. At the same time as that’s happening the pace is going up.
We heard yesterday about technology. The speed! More internet stuff, so all that’s pushing the speed up. At the same time as that’s happening, also everything is global, you know? You do something in one place but if you have your... 'I've started my new company.' You put you desk underneath your staircase. You connect to the internet, you're global! You with me?
At the same time as that’s happening lots of the traditional things which held us back like hierarchies, like reporting structures, are pushed back. The legal processes are pushed back. We know to a large extent that regulatory frameworks don’t necessarily work, so one of the things which has happened is the world has happily accelerated like that. Does everyone recognise that? That’s the easy bit. Say yes.
Audience in unison
Yes.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Good. Okay. Not interesting. More interesting; how are you learning and changing to match? I want to assume that once upon a time you were above the curve. Your projects were... you could see where you were going. You remember when they were interviewing Jonathan and he was talking about having some way of looking forward to the future?
What happened to our ability to learn and change at the same time as the world has accelerated? Have we kept ahead of the curve? Shall we do it together like a pantomime? I move horizontally. You shout up a bit, down a bit, the same. We get a group view and they can publish it in the Economist. Yes? Okay, 20 years ago we could learn faster than the world was changing. Action. Go! Shout if you want me to go up, down if you want me to go down. Action.
Audience in unison
Up... Down.
Audience member 6
Up! Up! Up!
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
It’s just you! Okay guys, this is the interesting part, the fact that the two lines crossed over. Let me try and explain to you what this means in actual practical sense. What it basically means is that we've suddenly changed the way in which we actually will be forced to do absolutely everything.
Think about any particular aspect. Organisations, especially large organisations, they always used to live on their budgets, one yearly processes. Do you still do that? Does it make any sense? Don’t you find that before the ink is dry the thing is already obsolete? Have you noticed that? The forecasts you read in the magazines. Haven’t you noticed how they always forecast 18 months, hoping you'd have forgotten what they said before it gets round to it? Have you noticed that?
Let's take something else. Let's take organisational structures. Most organisations are happily set up in hierarchies. That’s why you asked me about inertia. Have you noticed that a lot of the activities you have to work on cross the organisation or actually you have to bring in teenagers from outside to sit outside your organisation to make it happen?
Have you noticed the fact that things like your marketing strategies around your brands are slightly broken? The opportunities which would have been there have all disappeared, so you're scrambling around going, 'There's no business out there! There's no business out there!' Of course there's no business out there because anything anyone recognises as an opportunity is already gone. You with me?
So, am I giving you too hard a time? Okay, so things are broken. If you're going out looking for opportunities you're not going to find them. They are not there. Opportunities gone. Not there. Don’t exist. What you have to go do instead is you’ve got to go out and try and craft some possibilities of your own. Then you turn those into your opportunities, which is what we're hoping Bonnie will help us understand, and then you can turn those into your realities, which hopefully will generate lots and lots of cash for you. That’s basically what we're up to now.
The game is very different. It’s not about the crash. It’s about a fundamental way of doing everything differently. And even in terms of innovation. I mean the basic things around creativity for example; also broken. And that’s another area we're going to have to look at, you know, if you're living in a world where you can learn faster than the world is changing, if you want to try and work on something you can do the market research. You can do your good old diverge/converge stuff, and you do it and something comes out.
If you're living on this side of the curve, doing just a diverge/converge isn’t going to work – and anyway, who do you bring into that area to help you do the divergents? And anyway, if you bring the wrong people in they come up with the same old ideas and you don't move forward. You heard what Joe Ferry said about we bring in our people. Of course we bring in our people because they know the most, and we bring in other people and then we bring in the future as well. You with me?
What I'm trying to paint for you is a picture which says that we're more interested in the big patterns than the events, and one of the big patterns which this generates is we have to start to think a little bit differently about how we put together ideas around innovation. Innovation used to be a nice idea where you had... where basically you had the funnel. Do you remember the funnel? Have you come across this funnel idea? A simple concept. You have your ideas. You collect lots of them. You put them into the funnel. The more ideas you put in... Have you come across this idea, or is it just me? The more ideas you put into the funnel the more stuff comes out the bottom. Do you remember that stuff?
One of the things I do sometimes when I really want to play tricks on people is I have two plastic funnels – you know, the really cheap 20p ones – a big plastic funnel and a little plastic funnel, and I say to people... I fill them up with sugar and I say to people, 'Which one’s going to drop more sugar out?'And I have them in my hands like that, and everyone of course goes for the big one, and then I let go of them and nothing comes out of the big one, and tons pours out of the little one because I've blocked the big one.
That 100,000 to one is telling you that something’s going on, and in fact it’s even funnier than that. The more ideas you generate in an organisation, the more important it is for the organisation to study those ideas and be sure that they're correct ideas. In other words what they do is they get somebody really senior and important to help to sort the ideas. Who do they choose? The wacky director who’s going to come with mad ideas or the sensible finance guy? You know what the sensible finance guy does? Does he kill the sensible ideas which might turn into money or the wacky ones?
So basically you just spend more money putting more ideas in, in order to get more of the same out. We're thinking about innovation all wrong. If you remember the definition which Sir George put forward; innovation is not the same as creativity. For us innovation is the process... I'll do another one. 'Innovation is the process for turning' – and I put in brackets here the word 'new' – 'ideas into money,' and I put in here 'benefit to society.' It’s a journey. It’s not a thing, and so the way I want you to think about innovation and ideas is different.
I would like you to think about it completely different as we go through the rest of the thing. Not as ideas are something to be brought in mass, commoditised, stuck into a funnel. I want you to think of them as something quite precious, so for that I'm going to try and put an analogy, and so here I have my concept of what I think an idea should look like. I'm trying to draw, and I'm rubbish at this, a... I'm trying to draw a...? Come on.
Audience in unison
Rabbit..?
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Rabbit! Yes. Okay, because what I wanted to imagine is that the ideas are precious. Nobody wants a rabbit to be hurt, especially a beautiful rabbit like that. You wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to them. Our current way of trying to make things happen is we collect 100,000 rabbits and we put them at one end of... I don’t know, uh... Kings Cross. And we go 'Yea-hah!' And we are planning to turn them into money, yes? So 100,000 rabbits set off and they hop, and the come to the first road and they get squashed, ugh! Blood everywhere. Then they go a little bit further, somebody grabs them, puts them in the pot. They hop a little but more and then they fall on the train tracks – ugh! Etcetera. And it keeps going. I don't know, a dog rips out their throat – blood everywhere! And finally one rabbit out of that 100,000 limps towards the end...
Now that’s one way of doing it. Another way of doing it would be to work out exactly where the rabbits get killed, and that’s what we've spent a lot of our time thinking about. And what we've learned is there are certain areas where the ideas get killed over and over again. One of the areas is what we call creating the opportunity. You’ve got to make ways to create, capture, find ideas, improve, visualise them, and it’s not just your ideas. It’s ideas from the whole lot. It’s insight ideas. It’s not just light bulb pieces.
The second area which you’ve got to get good at is being able to actually achieve some focus. If you listened to the presentation from Joe Ferry you will realise that everything he was doing was aimed towards trying to drive their business and their values forward.
Now you’ve got make sure you engage the right people. Make sure they are all there. They're in a trusting space where you can actually allow them to get the good connection together. So, just thinking about those people sort of holding hands and being able to collaborate effectively. Then you’ve got to make absolutely certain that you're also in a position where you can actually protect them.
Again, I'll use the Virgin example, you know, so that you're absolutely certain that once you’ve gone through the door you can shut it behind you and nobody’s going to come along and try and mess you around. And then the final place is also this whole issue of actually trying to make everything happen, getting it done, the execution part.
What we're hoping we can do with some of our stories and our tools and techniques is, for example, David’s going to help you understand how to create a space where all these things can happen. Richard’s going to help you really explore how you find these possibilities, not just theoretically but for real. And Bonnie’s going to help us understand how we actually transform them into money. So that’s the way we are thinking about it, so that the way we are thinking about it, at five different areas. Still with me?
Audience in unison
Yes.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Okay, let’s keep going a little bit more. So, the last two bits, and then we can really get into more of the story. I heard something which chilled my blood. The first one was about fast failure and the other one was about asking permission. I like the idea of not asking permission. I like the idea of fast failure, but they chilled my blood, and I’ll tell you why. Because, you see, we say those things hoping the people who are listening get it. And if you are in the right sort of organisation – and I know in Jonathan’s organisation, they get it because he works with good people – but in large corporates the CEO always stands up and says, 'I expect everyone to take risks and make things better.' Are you with me? He says these words and they leave his mouth and he thinks they are going to be heard, but as they travel through the air they enter people’s ears and what they hear is not 'take risks,' but they hear 'do silly things. Get it wrong and I'll sack you.'
What happens is they are terrified of failure because in our old world failure was a bad thing. You did something wrong, bad. You failed. Of course, but the world we're living in... Hang on, failure, tell me about it. There are two ways to fail. Old world, you got something wrong, of course it was bad. You’d wasted resources. We knew how to do it. There were processes. You didn’t follow them.
New world: Do we have situations where you know what to do and you could have followed processes and you don’t? Yes, that’s one type of failure. That’s what we call dumb failure. I.e. you should have followed it; you didn’t. But there's another type of failure which is the really important failure. You're doing something new. No one’s done it before. No one has a clue. You're all working on it. You’ve tried everything. You involved people. You’ve tried to tell them to. You’ve tested it against the market, fantastic. You get all the money and you launch it, and it’s a disaster. It’s called smart failure.
Every time I work with one of my clients that’s the language it try and get into the organisation really early so they can distinguish between the two, thereby enabling them to talk properly about change and risk rather than talking about, you know, 'We expect you to take risks.' And anyway, one of the statistics, talking about underwear, which is really crucial to understand about risk, is that in the UK every single year 50 people approximately are killed by their underpants. Are your underpants risky? No. Well yes, actually they kill people. But moving on from that, the other part which I also want to build, and then that’s the last piece, is why centrally designed? Why design?
Yesterday when I was going back home on the train I picked up one of these magazines and it was one of these fashion magazines which had been left on the chair, and I was looking at it and I was thinking hard about what I had learned in the day about the making sure designs really encourage people and fit them. And there were these designs, and they were for people who obviously are going to wear funny clothes and have to walk in extra high high heel thingies, and they just looked incredibly uncomfortable. But, I thought, there's something wrong. But if you ask a designer who was putting together their new spring collection, that’s what they do. They don’t go, 'Yes, we want it to be really comfortable and...' No, they're doing something else.
You see, what happens is for each of us our view on innovation is slightly different because we are trying to achieve different things. So, for a start, what you'll find is that the designer who's been sitting in their office dreaming up wonderful ideas and coming up with creativity out of their head is going to push them into the marketplace and see what sticks. You can also have things which you get to because you are actually observing people and actually pulling in the ideas. We heard a little bit about that earlier on today from the teenage story, for example.
Then there's another dimension which is quite important, which is some things are based around technology. For example, Dyson know how to make air flow, so now they're going to give us... they’ve given us all sorts of things, hand driers, and now they are going to give us a fan. Are you with me? The technology is there, they’ve created it and they are going to push it into the marketplace. Nobody’s walking around going if only I had a fan which didn’t have blades. No, that’s not what they're doing, but that’s a different type of innovation. It comes from an invention.
Then there's a human side. Now, the thing is that depending on where you are and how much money you’ve got, you might want to approach it differently. If you’ve got deep pockets like GE then this area is going to be very interesting to you, which is the whole invention piece. Because the invention piece basically allows you to spend your money on your 40,000 scientists to come up with new stuff. That’s all right. No problem. If you're really into the fashion, the fast changing stuff, then that whole creative industries piece, cool hunting, cool trendy bit, fantastic! Great! But most of the organisations here are a bit strapped for cash. You are looking for ways of making things better. You are looking for ways of making things sustainable. You are looking for ways of containing and connecting to other people, so you’ve got to play slightly different games.
In this box over here, the pull – traditional – is the traditional role of design from decades ago where you take a product and make it look a little bit better and make it work better. We're not in that space anymore. This space here is the insight based bit where we look at people and try and understand and follow. Where we're trying to get to, I think, for us, is this wonderful red area here. That I think is what's relevant to most of the people here. It’s about user centred, design led innovation. Design led process of turning new ideas into money and benefits. Richard, tell us about design.
Richard Seymour, Director, Seymourpowell
From here or from there?
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
From wherever you like.
Richard Seymour, Director, Seymourpowell
I'll go there. Where’s the button?
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
The button.
Richard Seymour, Director, Seymourpowell
Do we have a button?
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Yes, we do, sir.
Richard Seymour, Director, Seymourpowell
There's the button. Thank you very much. Is it the middle button or the top button or the..?
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
It’s the right hand button. Can you do it?
Richard Seymour, Director, Seymourpowell
A hundred and eighty three people last year were killed by other people’s underpants, by the way. And 27% of the people sitting in here will suffer a brain haemorrhage by listening to anybody that can speak 16 words a second.
Was it the right one? Was it the wrong one? This is what I'm talking about. How intuitive is this? Yes? It doesn’t work.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
I’ll tell you what I'll do. I'll do the...
Richard Seymour, Director, Seymourpowell
Can you do it for me?
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Yes, I'll do the easy bit. I'll press the button here.
Richard Seymour, Director, Seymourpowell
And I'm the product designer! Next one, please. Oh, no sound please. Thank you very much. See how easy this all is? I was fascinated this morning to hear Jonathan and to show that picture of Maria. Did you see the female robot from Metropolis? Do you remember where you had that? All those wires coming out of her. Were they going into her or were they going out of her? You guys are obsessed with metrics. Obsessed. You know want to prove something’s going to happen. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how you can find things without necessarily having to go through the metrics of doing it first.
Do you seriously believe that if you ask somebody on a rainy November evening in Croydon and give them a Kit Kat and a fiver that they are going to tell you what's going to happen in the future? Do you really believe that? They're going to answer you because you’ve paid them, but the answer that they're going to give you is going to be unreliable at best and could be massively diverging at another. It you put your belief and trust in that then you must be going mad.
People can tell you what they have liked. They can tell you what they do like. They cannot tell you what they are going to like. Some of them can, but you will not be able to spot them from the ones that cannot. If you pin your future on that you are comprehensively fucked. This is stuff, all right? Now, I'm not looking for lowest common denominator with some of these things. We've already heard from Joe this morning. That’s Virgin Galactic on the top left. Seymour Powell has been working on that, on the interior for instance and the pre-visualisation of it.
Do you think everybody wants to go into space? Do you think everybody would want to do that? It’s 200,000 bucks for a starter, but do you think everybody wants to do that? No they don’t, I suspect. Even if you could afford to do it, some of us would and some of us would not. We're not looking for the lowest common denominator solution for everything, which is what a lot of 'research,' in inverted commas, does.
I'm a research enthusiast, do not get me wrong. I believe in understanding what I need to do next very clearly. Steve Jobs of Apple believes in understanding what he's going to do next, he just doesn’t ask anybody’s permission to do it. And maybe we can answer this gentleman’s question over here later on to do with how do you get large, heavily matrixed organisations to change the way in which they work. You poison the waterhole – I'll talk a little bit about that later.
Let's do the next one. Eddie, is it the right had one? It is. Different rabbit. I'm going to talk to you about... How may people have talked to you about design sofa? Do you know what it is? Do you know what 'designing' is – the verb? Maybe it is, as George has referred to, this liminal thing; this thing that connects the idea with the innovation with the commercialisation of it. It’s more than that, because it’s taking out of the equation something that you’ve been force fed for the last ten years; that everybody’s creative and that everybody can do everything. They can not.
As with anything, if you get someone who’s really good at it they're going to do a better job of it than someone who did not, and I'm not saying that because I'm trying to sell you the consultancy. I'm trying to stop you making some dreadful mistakes. A designer, a good one, is an empath. By that I mean they absorb everything they see around them. They take in what they see, not the figures, but the anthropology, and they excrete solutions.
A really good one, as you'll see at the end of this, works backwards in time. They end up with something that seems to have appeared in their mind and then backtrack often to find out why that was the right reason. The brain of the designer, the reason they did it in the first place, is different. Remember Eddie’s funnels? You love your funnels and your conduits and your pipelines and everything else, but that’s a linear thing. Designing, creating new things that work is not linear. It’s chaotic. It’s non-linear. The designer’s brain, the good ones, are non-linear.
If any of you have ever seen The Crystal Maze on television you’ll have seen that funny thing at the end where all the stuff gets blown up into the air, thousands of bits, and there are people trying to grab it. That’s the closest analogy to the creative process I've seen. It’s bits, new patterns, all up at the same time being connected. A really good designer’s brain works that way. If you bring this further up the food chain in what you do, you'll understand how that works. It will still scare the shit out of you, but you'll understand how it works.
The dog in this case is the people that are going to do it and the rabbit is the subject. The closer we can bring these two together the more successful we're actually going to be. This man here – the sound is off – has just been in a focus group where he’s told us how brilliant this switch is. This lockable switch that blocks the operation of his stair lift so that his grandchildren can't injure themselves on it. He's actually now telling you how brilliant is it. If I turned up the sound you'd hear him say it. It’s fantastic. Don’t get rid of it. He can't do it, can he? Seventeen seconds to get the key in. Not only can he not do it, he doesn’t know he can't do it, and even if he did know he couldn’t do it, he probably wouldn’t tell you that he couldn’t do it.
What we say and what we do are different. I fiercely agree with most things that have been said this morning, and I fiercely disagree with most of the things I've heard this morning. We are like that. We are full of contradictions, and one of the things that really work for me is watching what people do. Anthropology. Get over it. Yes we're equal. Yes we're different. This is... design is no place... creating the future is no place for political correctness.
We are metabolically, organically completely different in many regards. What we like, how things work, what we want, are different. So what the hell is wrong with that? And if you believe that you can... it all out... Why do you think that most car dashboards could bring down the outer planets if you press a button over there when in fact you only need three? Why do you think that is? Why are washing machines far more complex than they need to be? Who’s designing them and why, and what are the agendas? We were designing a washing machine in a Japanese company ten years ago, it had neurophysiologic in it. They said, 'We're worried because it only needs one button.' I said, 'Yes, but wait till you see the button... Wait till you see my button.'
Apple isn’t about simplicity. Don’t think for a moment that Apple is about simplicity. Apple is about beautiful, laminated complexity. It’s about enjoying stuff and filtering out the shit that you don’t want to play with. That’s not simplification. Do you want a simpler banquet? Maybe we’ll knock three of the courses out. Don’t be dismayed over this. This leads us to something wonderful. If you put anthropology before technology, if you really watch you will see the future because the future is in emergent behaviour.
This is ethnographic work asking people why they... how they open things, what they're reading on the back of the pack. We’re actually distracting them by saying look, you know, can you read this, but what we're doing is turning the sound off and watching. The lady in the middle at the top, I'm not going to show it because I haven’t got enough time, eventually picks up a pair so scissors and cuts the bag halfway across. That’s a bag of frozen peas. And we say, 'Why did you do that?' And she says, 'Because I can.' And then she does this weird thing. It’s like these two rabbits here, she ties them together and she’s sealed that bag. What do you think sits at the bottom of the freezer when you defrost it? How many women answered that question and how many men answered that question? Peas and sweet corn.
The reason why we do this kind of activity is not only do we find the problem in the future of the solution, we find three solutions. That woman had done a go-around because pea packaging is crap that suits the factory and lowest cost. It is not good for you, and that’s why the bottom of the freezer is still covered in peas. If you look for the emergent behaviour, the way that we're working around problems, you will see the future of the right kind of solution. That’s something Jobs does very well, and that’s what that was.
I'm going to ask you a different question today. Who has not got a kettle that lifts off its base in this room? Right, we're down to about 9%. Over 90% of all kettles sold in this country are a cordless kettle, and Seymourpowell did that 26 years ago. A quarter of a century ago. It’s still the dominant species. Why was it successful when all of the retailers said you'll never sell a kettle for £19.99? Was it solving a problem that didn’t exist? It was simplifying the task. It was making it less dangerous, but it was easier and more engaging because that task was bad. How did we get to it? Dozens of ways, but one of them was my mum putting the live pigtail off the old push-up-the-kazoo one over the plate rack and it falling into the gravy and projecting the food all over the ceiling. Anthropology. If you can learn to watch and see you'll find it.
From an industrial and a commercial point of view, get this. A really good design is incredibly cheap. The Casio Baby-G watches that we created and the 137 million products it finally produced – design was .001p in that per unit. A bad design means you’ve to advertise yourself out of the problem and generally cause yourself grief. A bad design’s incredibly expensive. Find yourself a good one if you're going to do it.
Cutting out the middle man in this process is critically important. There's a lot of people out there who’d love to sell you innovation and talk to you about innovation processes. The gentleman over there, is there one process for instance? Don’t go for something that leaves you at the bus stop, right? You have to make a service or a product, then it has to be in the market and people want to buy it, the brand and the product. And existentialists would say design that doesn’t do that isn’t design at all, it can't occur unless it gets to the end of that pipeline. Ideas are, I can assure you, a dime a dozen. Properly targeted, commercialised and exquisitely beautiful and compelling, and addictive products are not. And the people that can do those last four words are the really good designers. The empaths. The ones with the skills. The ones that can actually put it together.
Do not believe for a moment that we are all equally creative, as I said, because we're not. Find the best people that you can and focus them on this and get rid of these because they're getting in the way. A lot of very large FMCG companies have legions, stratified legions of people, one of them whom I asked... I said, 'Why is that junior person interfering with the design?' And the head of the marketing department said, 'Well, if he weren’t doing the advertising of the design and playing with it, what else would we do?' And he was absolutely right.
Begin at the end. Find out what the emergent behavioural opportunities are. Find out what's brilliant. Find the things that bring joy where there's misery. Fix the things that are bust, not the things that are not. Start at the end and work your way back, and that’s how you do it. Thanks.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Thank you very much. Thank you. I'd like to invite David Kester to come and share with us a really quite tough story, and, David.
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Let's have a look and see whether this works. Shall we just see whether that... it does. Look, there we are. Well, I want to talk about the conditions for innovation, and how we actually create that space. And we heard about the GE analogy absolutely; sometimes it’s absolutely right to have 6,000 innovators or designers in Bangalore. Sometimes it isn’t appropriate, or actually you couldn’t afford to do it. So how do you create that space, than environment? And is it going to happen in your business or does it actually have to happen outside your business?
Now, the thing that we do – we don’t design, but we often create the space. And I want to talk about that because it’s something that really I believe, is incredibly important. The environment, the context in which actually the innovation can take place and the new thinking can be made real. So I'm going to start here with a project that actually Richard helped chair, and he was very important to this – and I'm going to bring him into this as well. I'm going to give you a very, very big employer. They are bigger that GE. They are the fourth biggest employer in the world. Do you know who they are?
Audience member 7
The NHS?
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Absolutely. Actually, only after the Chinese army, the Indian National Railway, and Wal-Mart I'm told. And their big problem in this case, and this is, you know, this is a recent story from us, the recent story is this one: MRSA, C.difficile. The NAO told us at the time that we started to work on this just 18 months ago was costing 9 billion a year, 5,000 deaths in the UK alone. And this is something that the World Health Organisation talks about because it’s a global issue.
This is a problem, but of course, as we’ve talked about earlier, problems can be unmet needs and therefore commercial opportunities. But the difficulty is – take the GE analogy – you're working in your vertical, in your area. Yes, maybe actually this isn’t something that you on your own are going to be able to solve. Maybe actually these solutions are going to come from lots of different collaborators, so how do you create those collaborations? How do you manufacture them? A little bit like we heard from Penguin as well.
So with the NHS, what do you think – and there's a clue because somebody put their hand up on this one earlier – what do you think – and I will shout them back at you – what do you think some of the obstacles for the NHS in making innovation happen here against such a colossally difficult problem? What do you think? The obstacles, the problems that...?
Audience member 8
Bureaucracy.
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Bureaucracy. Absolutely, and that inertia point that somebody mentioned.
Audience member 9
Budget.
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Budget? Absolutely. Resources.
Audience member 10
Media and politics.
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Media? Politics? Absolutely, and in this case the politics was actually saying deep clean. So there we are. You’ve got complexity, silos, inertia, a risk aversion, you know, will we experiment? Conflict. You’ve got lots of different opposing forces saying; do this, do that, do the other. How are you going to resolve these different things? So what are you trying to move this to – because you're trying to shift from this to what? What's the shift to, sort of things that you're shifting to?
Audience member 11
Simplicity.
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Simplicity maybe, yes, absolutely.
Audience member 12
Momentum.
Audience member 13
Collaboration.
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Momentum? Momentum.
Audience member 14
Engagement.
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Engagement. I heard collaboration too I think. Exactly, so it is exactly these sort of things we need. Simplicity, we want engagement, we want... we want to experiment, we want a spirit of experimentalism, we want these sorts of collaborations taking place – otherwise there will be no innovation.
I'm going to very quickly take you on a journey that Richard chaired and it started exactly where he said he would start, because we sent – exactly as that little film showed – we sent designers into hospitals working with ethnographers to try to understand what was going on. To try to see beyond things; work with the cleaning staff, the porters, the nurses; work with the patients as well. And of course what they came back with – they were looking with this issue – and they said, 'Well, isn’t that interesting. Everyone’s saying clean, clean, clean, but actually, look at what you actually... look at what you're confronted with in a hospital.'
That’s just one picture, one photograph that came back from the research groups. But the really unique insight was then that a hospital needs to be easy to clean and easy to keep clean. Now that sounds very simple. But also working with the scientists, and we had everybody together, and that was very important. We brought all of the specialists together and manufactured the process so that they could meet the right people at the right time. We discovered well, quite clearly the bedside environment was going to be important, and shaping behaviours were going to be important as well – and how could we create nudges and prompts along the way that might actually shape behaviours?
Now in this context – and it’s not always – but actually in this context we felt that actually products rather like, as I've been shown, that if you take an... People who take Apple iPhones out of their pockets always seem to go like this with them – that actually your products themselves will shape the behaviour, so maybe that’s a way to actually shape and change the behaviour here.
I'm going to quickly cut to the chase because we didn’t want to hear too many case stories, and I want to get to what the model looks like at the end. Let's just though look at what success looked like. So a few key things here. A redesigned commode. You all know what a commode looks like. Horrible normally. Actually a big piece of furniture. It’s got fabric. It’s got screws and eyelets. It’s usually made of about 40-odd working parts. Here, brought down to about ten to 12, goes into a sluice room. It’s stackable, brought in on the same price point.
How do you get there? Well, the interesting thing here is a completely new collaboration. This is actually, interestingly – back with Joe Ferry – this is the team that did the Virgin sleep seat that he brought in. Never worked in healthcare before. Brought together with the manufacturer. So the interesting thing was also the combination of the commercial interests at play, and actually here the same team working on a bedside chair.
This is not a bedside chair that you're familiar with seeing in a hospital, is it? But here it just says... it’s shaping behaviour. It says 'clean me,' doesn't it? And it’s... all the parts are... you know, magnetised on and interchangeable, so really clever thinking here – absolutely on the money. And new ergonomics, an improved product and again, on the price point this is a commercial proposition.
And here, small items, and actually, interestingly, here the collaboration extended and we went out into our universities. And in this case it was actually the Royal College of Art. And here, just take a look at the sort of little ideas; borrowing from the food industry to put a time tracker on a cannula because actually if you leave it in for more than for more than 75 hours you’re liable to get MRSA or C.difficile.
Why not actually... why do we have to have these fabric type blood pressure cuffs? Why can't they be wiped clean and magnetised? And here, why not have an Intelligent Mattress that tells you if it’s damaged, because they don’t get changed more than once... often, actually, they can stay in use for up to five years – and if they are damaged and there's human waste it can pass on MSRA and C.difficile. So clever ideas brought to life by unique insights.
I haven’t got the time to actually tell you the brilliant stories about the nurses on a ward who spotted that problem around C.difficile and that mattress. So it came absolutely from them and their unique insights. Here, back to what Eddie was saying, and somebody said talk about the failures – set off two teams here to work on the same project, a bedside cabinet, one has not taken, the one that’s actually on the right here. The one on the left has, and actually that’s going to be a big export for that company around the world, and indeed they’ve been redesigning the rest of their product range on the same premise. One smart... I mean, they're both... you know, one is smart failure, the other has been success. But actually by putting everybody in the same space for a short period of time we were able to actually tease some of those issues out.
So, very quickly, what do we learn from this? I mean, firstly there are some very hard outcomes, and this is... you know, nobody entered into this and spent their own time and money just for the joy of it. This was actually because they were trying to get value. From an NHS perspective they're trying to save lives, they're trying to also reduce to cost to the taxpayer. But all the businesses that took part, they’ve only got one objective, and that’s they're looking to create products and services that they can sell around the world – end of story.
So what we've done here is we've reduced the time to market phenomenally. Nine months to prototype; 12 months to market; 18 months, over £1 million of orders. Low levels of subsidy – interestingly here there's a whole procurement model. Leveraging the power of public procurement by spotting a problem that matters and flipping it round. And that’s back to Richard’s industrial judo point. It’s actually taking the problem, flipping it over and saying, 'Actually, that’s an opportunity.' The problem that we, the taxpayer, care about – which is we don’t want to get sick when we go into hospital – we can turn that around. We can turn that into a commercial opportunity.
And here, very key to the exercise was, for us, and as architects of innovation, was rewriting the IP protocol, so that it was the business' themselves. And in this case we heard somebody say, 'Where’s the new model for designers?' Well, here it was; about sharing intellectual property with manufacturers and technologists because actually it was in all of these unique combinations that came together. We said, 'You own the IP, not the Crown. You own the IP. It gives you then the motivation to do all of the innovation and invest in it.' Which is exactly what they did.
So what have we actually achieved here? We have actually in this exercise, and I wouldn’t say... I absolutely wouldn’t say we've done it across the NHS. We've done it in this boundaried space. There's a very bigger question about how you diffuse that across what is a very large organisation. But certainly here – and I see in the audience Susan Osborne, who was chief nurse at the time in the East of England, and was part of this – one of the challenges we faced is how you actually, within a very large organisation get uptake of the processes, the mindset. But this here has been doing something, and there are several key things that it’s done. Let’s quickly look through.
Firstly, by visualising things very quickly on the journey it enabled us to move from complexity to simplicity. The whole journey has been user led. That’s really enabled the engagement to take place. Optimism was key. And I have to say, Richard’s one of the most optimistic people. It’s all about optimistic futures, and he was inserted into this when we had big problems. We know, my goodness me, the arguments that we had about IP protocols, but actually having somebody with the optimism and the conviction behind the project made a huge amount of different when we hit those big problems.
Prototyping was so key, so that as you could see, some things could actually fall by the wayside and permission was given to fail. And finally, in that... in resolving... I mean, ultimately we captured in a safe space there for nine months groups of companies and commercial interests that usually compete against each other, and also ideas that compete against each other, and we said we can create a boundaried space where those can coexist – so the safe space was really key.
So my little two models to give you as a reflection, which I hope are useful. One is, as Eddie said, divergent/convergent thinking, fine – but the really important thing here is most people... certainly we find, and as I said we worked with thousands of small firms in high tech ventures, and we find it over and again, is that they think that design starts at that middle point. We'll tell you what the problem is and then you go and come up with a few ideas around it. We'll select one and then we'll do it. That’s what people traditionally think is design.
The bit that’s happening here, which is, I think, the heart of this design thinking piece as well, is that one actually says, 'No, the design bit starts much earlier in this discovery phase...' And then on into the definition phase as well, and you can see that’s... it was in that discovery phase that we were doing all that behaviour led design research. It was then from there that we were workshopping with experts and so forth down to key problems that we could put out to designers.
And so, finally, that’s the sort of vision that we have of what that safe space really looks like, and you can replace... In this context there's policy because it was a Government issue; how to reduce this big problem that, you know, the £9 billion cost. So you’ve got big policies of deep clean up top, you’ve got a completely different user experience down at the bottom, a very different set of ideas of what it really feels like in the hospital, and – very importantly – a lot of really great ideas already there. And what we keep on finding, and we're at the moment working on patient dignity, and what we've found looking at the patient experience, a service led idea, is that when you're down here a lot of the nurses have already got the ideas, and in fact they’ve got little workarounds that give you all the clues. So the safe space is then bringing all of those together so that hopefully you can join the two up. That’s the safe space.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
I'd like Bonnie to give us a view on how you actually commercialise it because David’s already explained how you actually start the process of the safe space. Here's another challenge for us.
Bonnie Dean, Senior Adviser, Quantum Property Partnership, SPark
I want to pick up on some of the ideas that David’s talked about in terms of using the safe space to commercialise existing technologies very quickly. But before I do that, the Design Council, as David mentioned, has spent many years helping inventors and scientists commercialise their technology by using design thinking to create products and services that could be invoiced sooner rather than later, and we've been very successful at it.
We've had 80% change strategic direction to focus on near term opportunities and the majority raised new funding to support that change in their direction; 65% improved their competitiveness through better branding and communication, and 55% found new partners and formed new ventures to bring their ideas to markets more quickly. But we also discovered pushing ideas out from research laboratories in spare rooms is a very slow process, and reaching commercial scale it can be a long journey.
Given today’s economic challenges we decided to look at how commercial opportunities could be created more quickly using design to apply existing technologies in new ways to meet unmet consumer needs. For example, 85% of 11 to 16 year olds carry mobile phones daily and they use them actively in open spaces, turning them into hot products. And hot products are mobile phones, they're iPods, they're laptops, they're bicycles. They're high value products that are easy to target that are easy to steal and they're easy for criminals to re-sell. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, because in a population of 60 million in this country we have 75 million mobile phone users.
Hot product crime occurs on a pervasive scale in the UK. As you can see form the statistics on the screen 228 mobile phones are lost or stolen every hour. That’s 1.8 million per year, so on one level, at £10 a handset, it might be a minor inconvenient problem for parents and users to get a new handset, but if we take into account the expanding amount of private and confidential data that is stored on phones by adults and businesses, that turns £80 million of inconvenient transactions replacing handsets into a much bigger business opportunity to secure and protect data. And there's also a forecast that by 2015 wireless transactions from mobile devices in the UK will be worth £151 billion a year.
We applied the safe space technique that David just described to this problem which meant that we could work with all the key influencers, from experts at leading technologists such as Toshiba Laboratories, Vodafone and others, to including the criminals that know how to steal handsets into our safe space to try and come up with some ideas, and we identified two immediate business opportunities and one future one.
The immediate business opportunities were cooling down these hot products at an affordable cost but maintaining attractiveness and ease of use. We also identified an opportunity to protect private data right at the point of crime or loss. And then with the forecasted rise in wireless transactions we looked at opportunities to build consumer confidence in using handsets as payment devices.
The timeframe that David described was nine months to full prototype. Well, in this case it took us six months to get three prototypes developed, and I'd like to show you two short clips of less than a minute each that shows how we've used Bluetooth technology and encryption technology to solve some of these problems and bring two new prototypes to market. I should say before the two films run you'll notice that the criminal in both cases is in the Economist and Design Council red, and this is not meant to signify anything more than these are hot products.
Watch the animations Bonnie showed at the event:
I think you can see from those two quick films that there are some simple new solutions that we developed using existing technology, and that it was very, very quick. We showcased these at Mobile World in Barcelona last week to tremendous interest from Team Mobile, Orange, Three, MasterCard, and others, and Imigo, the product in the first film, is launching this summer, so in conclusion from aircraft technology of the 21st century to wireless technology of the 22nd century, design can find new ways of plying existing technologies now to address unmet needs.
In terms of economic recovery, new applications of this existing technology can offer many advantages for businesses: Immediate market demand, customer familiarity with the technology, existing supply chains, and most importantly, and I think this is most important for the UK, the possibility to scale quickly. Thank you.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
And that’s where we are, so what I'm just going to ask you is for a one sentence summary from my friends, of one thing which they think you should take away and remember, or one thing you should take away and do. If I could start with you, Richard. One thing.
Richard Seymour, Director, Seymourpowell
Anthropology before technology, actually. If it’s not right for people it isn’t right. Unless something’s compelling and delightful it will wither and disappear, so if you want the big stuff, go for that.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
David?
David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council
Look for new ways to collaborate. Look for those new spaces, those free spaces, that you will actually be able to create that innovation.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Great. Bonnie?
Bonnie Dean, Senior Adviser, Quantum Property Partnership, SPark
Bring design thinking in as early as possible.
Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning, Pentacle
Thanks, and from me it’s really about finding other ways of making change happen and not being scared of it, not being afraid of the issues, nurturing those ideas and realising that if you get it right the ideas can actually make you very successful indeed. The key piece, I think, as a group, to move forward is to think about how you drive those verticals and connect them. And again, within the Design Council, because of our links to Government, we can actually allow that process of a safe space to happen. Thank you very much, and thanks for listening to us.