28/9/2020
How do you provide the right maker at the right time?
It's been about six years since I got to work on building MakerLab. Ignorant as we were back then, we boldly entered the innovation bubble and performed our 'innovation acceleration shows'.
Following the design thinking principles, we introduced the product 'MakerLab' to the market and quickly learned that it wasn't a sustainable path we were treading. Back to the drawing board, then.
Every innovator, product developer or process improver knows the "age-old" saying that a prototype says more than 1,000 words....
By now we are older and have learned a lot. We have focused on helping companies develop and optimize products, services and processes. Not as consultants, but by providing evidence.
To 'take concrete action that leads to proven insights that further your development process.' In other words, by creating something. Because that's what we placed at the heart of MakerLab.
Why is making so important? Because every innovator, product developer or process improver knows the "age-old" saying that a prototype says more than a thousand words. So we like to make things concrete and measurable.
And if that's not enough, we also do it from the experimental point of view: we create exactly what is needed to learn enough for the next step forward.
And so we call our employees "experiment and business designers." They systematically set up experiments, translate insights gained into follow-up actions, and measure their relevance for customers and the company itself. "Lean product development" is the fancy term.
We worked in healthcare, financial services, mobility and transportation, telecom, energy and then I forget a few sectors. We saw commercials on TV of products we had worked on and travelers using an improved security process at Schiphol Airport.
Our own company experiment has become quite serious. We have now established two sister companies, and within MakerLab, there are 17 professional makers. Personally, MakerLab is without a doubt the most enjoyable school I have ever attended!
MakerLab Resourcing
However, there is no time to rest. We are working as a team to improve our services. And in that context, it was high time to put an important insight into action.
Qualitative user research, ideation sessions, a dry-wallet experiment, feature validation via the canoe test or a thoughtful concierge experiment to observe market potential.
It's just a small selection from dozens of types of experiments we use here. The bottom line? The various steps in developing and improving products, services, and processes require different types of creators.
Understanding the context of a problem to be solved is quite different from determining the ideal cost per lead for a digital campaign, just as validating the business impact requires different skills than a co-creation session with your clients.
The different steps in developing and improving products, services and processes require different types of creators
As you go through the different phases of product development, it also changes the necessary making skills. That is why we have built our workforce over the past few years in such a way that we can employ makers in a variety of phases who accelerate the process appropriately.
But a team of diverse creators, that is not within reach for every company. And we felt it was time to change that.
This fall we are launching the next MakerLab experiment: MakerLab Resourcing. The goal? Making sure you have the right maker on your team at the right time. We ask just 3 questions:
- What stage of development is your project in?
- What focus do you need to accelerate?
- What manufacturing capacity is central to this?
Based on this, we pair the right creator with your team to help take your project to the next stage.
For MakerLab, this is another exciting new step in our journey in the land of innovation. I'm curious to see what insights this step will bring us. But you'll hear from me naturally.
