Friday5: Open Service Design by Simon Vagn Larsen

It’s our second Friday5 blog at innovatrs.com. This Friday we introduce Simon Vagn Larsen from Open Service Design Ltd. ONE: Simon, describe your venture in not more than three sentences! I’m no good with the status quo! Open Service Design Ltd is all about exploring, testing, probing, and creating new and better services in collaboration with interesting people. We (well, I really) facilitate the bringing together of people’s differences and their objectives to everyone’s benefit and more often than not managing the change process from the present to the ‘new’. TWO: What’s typically involved in your service? Conversations; questions, active listening, relationship building, observation (all the good ethnographic stuff), and any number of [other] service design and innovation approaches, methods and tools, depending on the situation. I also do a lot of strategic development with executive teams and their managers (and operational teams i.e. the people on the ground where the real innovation most often happen!) to allow them to better appreciate the why, how, and what in relation to where they want to get to (objectives and outcomes). I don’t believe in separating ‘strategy’ on the one hand and ‘design and innovation’ on the other. They are inextricably linked and an organisation won’t succeed if the leadership team thinks about strategy in isolation from the continuous integration of that strategy at a more tactical and operational level (via, among other things, service design and innovation). That separation happens more often than people think (and say…). We can all quote the management literature, but few organisations (which, let’s remember, is merely a collective of individuals within a commonly agreed/acknowledged structure) are able to execute and make the appropriate linkages, set up governance structures that facilitate, rather than hinder, and design processes that allow the strategy to filter through the layers of the organisation. THREE: What are the top three stakeholders a start-up has to take care about? 1) Your significant other, or other close family, friends, partners – without whom you either struggle to get off the ground, stay afloat, or come through a crash in a reasonable state i.e. learning the lessons preparing you for your next adventure! 2) Clients; prospective, existing, future, past – nurture the relationships even if there’s no immediate ‘gain’ from your perspective. As a start-up, you need to ‘work the floor’ 3) People who can help you whether it’s seeing things differently, coaching and mentoring, professional partnerships/collaborations – you typically have no or limited budget for [formal] learning and development, so make every interaction an opportunity to learn I should probably have said the bank/financier, or something similarly intelligent, but by my reckoning that is second-in-line to the list above. – Depends on your business model, profession, and other circumstances, though. FOUR: What’s the biggest challenge start-ups have to face regarding corporate structure? Keeping it as simple as possible while being able to engage and communicate professionally and with authority to stakeholders FIVE: What is the craziest product/service a client of yours offers? Well, it’s not so much a discrete service as it is the staggering amount of effort this particular organisation puts into ensuring that a very, very small and not at all profitable, or even influential segment of its client base, which admittedly is highly diverse and dispersed, is provided with top-notch advice and support at any given time. We have debated the topic on numerous occasions and we’re not really moving any closer to any sort of resolution. We are, however, accepting each other’s points of view. BONUS: Who’s your favorite entrepreneur? And what have you learned from him relating to your consultancy? I know so many inspiring people who do amazing things every day! Plenty of organisations inspire in different ways e.g. P&G (commitment to innovation in very different products and markets), Coca Cola (marketing c’mon), Amazon (for continuous differentiation and being among the first to harness crowd sourcing), but at a personal level I really relate mostly to people who I’m lucky enough to engage with on a regular basis; typically social innovators.  I look at them and consider how I can leverage their skills and expertise, and adopt the components that would make a positive difference in my own [client] engagements. If you need to source innovative products and partners, submit a brief now! Andreas