The success of that first Innovation Lab was a big win, despite a limited bankroll behind it. As Josef described, “That was a really big boost for UCP in general because that whole event was bootstrapped. It was done with very little funding. It’s funny, because having very little funding pushes you to get very creative.”
Outcomes
The level of engagement of the Innovation Lab attendees was a key metric of interest to the UCP team. “It’s more about creating stories that feed into the mission of UCP in a broader sense,” Josef explained. Marc added:
The people that attend are future donors or future sponsors, as are their companies. The most important outcome to me is people coming out of it and saying, “I like the process. I’m going to have that in mind when I go back to my job”—whatever their job is. It will have changed their approach to their work. You don’t have to be an expert on disabilities, but you do have to have that interest. That’s the first step.
Josef noted that the event helped to spark new interest in how design can help people with disabilities, a topic that many attendees had not previously considered.
Over the next several years, Life Labs ran a series of Innovation Lab events around the country, all using a similar format.
The Next Life Labs Step: The Incubator
The creation of an incubator for start-ups was the next part of the Life Labs strategic plan. Complementing and extending the work of the Innovation Labs, it would add mentoring, investing, access to UCP’s affiliate network, and a direct connection to users to facilitate testing of the new products and services developed. The aim was to create a mechanism to support follow-through on the ideas generated in the Innovation Labs entrepreneurial ecosystem. The hope was that, with the incubator in place, the ideas generated in the Innovation Lab events would be more likely to be developed into real products and services. Marc observed:
For people doing work in disabilities, testing can be a big hurdle. How do you get someone with dementia into the design process? We can make that connection. If we can get these companies to survive a little bit longer, help them get a product to market, some of them will keep going. We’re creating a safety net for those willing to market and sell to this marginalized population. We’ll help them get to that population and make the idea sustainable—and they’ll get a paycheck while they create great products for our population. That’s our intention. We need more people trying.
Josef added:
You hear stories of innovators that have created a $50 version of a $10,000 product. We want to see that replicated! It’s not unusual to have a prosthetic that’s $50,000, and yet you can 3-D print prosthetics for $100 or less.
The Life Labs team visited the Cerebral Palsy Alliance, a UCP affiliate in Sydney, Australia. There, they met with a team that created chairs specifically contoured to the body of individuals with disabilities, intended to fit each person exactly. Unfortunately, as the team explained, by the time they measured and then fabricated the chair, their client’s body sometimes had degenerated further and the chair no longer met that client’s needs. The team realized that they needed a faster way, as well as a cheaper one. They hoped that the combination of the quick Innovation Lab events, coupled with the availability of incubator support, would expedite the development process.
In fall 2015, Josef was appointed director of Life Labs. He reflected on next steps at that time, as they set a goal of hosting Innovation Lab events in more than six different cities in 2016:
I think people will come to think of the Innovation Lab as a bridge between highly skilled individuals across different professions and those in the community expressing need and the desire to be a part of the solution. We’ve tried hard to keep the focus on the process rather than the outcomes, but that will change as Life Labs moves toward creating a business incubator and the Innovation Lab becomes a pathway to the incubator. But I really intend to keep the focus on the design process as much as possible. I think people crave collaboration and social interaction more than they crave entrepreneurship in its traditional sense.
Reflections on the Process
The urge to create, Marc believed, was powerful, but the connections to produce the new product or experience, to find the market, were often missing among the kinds of amateur makers that UCP sought to assist. He noted that Life Labs’s incubator hoped to make those connections and to find buyers for niche, but crucial, services and products for people with disabilities:
People want to create something—that’s a lot of what designers and engineers want. Just tell me—I want to create a company, but tell me what the world needs. What are the problems out there? And they want to solve them. One thing that I’ve learned in the last two years is the importance of learning how to work across industries—never pigeonhole yourself into one area. That’s the brilliance of the Innovation Lab: getting designers with caregivers, making use of people from such a variety of industries.
Marc encouraged others to try a similar approach to connecting creators with those in need:
You don’t have to be an expert to hold this type of event—or come from a disability background. You don’t have to be an expert to do something innovative in an organization. You don’t have to be an expert in assistive technology to create things at an Innovation Lab. You just have to have the curiosity.
Curiosity, Josef noted, can be so easily lost, but without curiosity new ideas will lie undiscovered:
When you become an adult, you lose some of that curiosity. That’s the great thing about maker spaces—they give adults the opportunity to get a little curious again. There’s fun in that. Having fun is important. It doesn’t all have to be about creating business and making money. Have fun, because there are some really brilliant things that come out of that.
Postmortem
Sometimes reality intrudes and having a great idea isn’t enough. Life Labs no longer exists; it was shuttered in early 2016. Having pursued a different kind of vision for a Web 3.0 version of a charitable organization, Life Labs fell apart for real-world reasons not necessarily connected to design thinking. Leadership support for Life Labs and its proposed innovation incubator evaporated as funding challenges and management changes swamped the organization. UCP’s six Innovation Lab events planned for 2016 were never undertaken, and the incubator concept was not advanced, after Life Labs failed to convince key stakeholders that it had created a sustainable way to overcome funding problems. Josef joined Marc in taking his design skills elsewhere, while UCP is today going through a change of administration and dealing with a sagging donations market.
Many of UCP’s larger organizational problems involved questions of identity and brand, including how each of the eighty or so self-governing affiliates saw the international operation and its relation to the reality of the many disabilities, including autism spectrum disorder and Down syndrome, that UCP now seeks to address in addition to cerebral palsy. Though Life Labs and its incubator could potentially have connected product designers with people affected by any of the other disabilities, and in the process achieved greater economies of scale, many local affiliates failed to see Life Labs’s relevance to their own work.
Because less than half of the people UCP served actually have cerebral palsy, and 85 percent have multiple disabilities, even the name United Cerebral Palsy is under fire today. About 20 percent of UCP’s independent affiliate organizations have already changed their names and mission statements, and pressure is accelerating for a name change for the national organization. Powerful forces are pushing for retrenchment to the core mission, and the dues from the independent affiliates that sustained operations at headquarters are beginning to decline.
In our view, Life Labs was an inspired idea—one we believe will be re-created in other contexts in the future. The approach had many positive attributes:
• Like the conversations we looked at in the FDA, it brought people with different backgrounds and perspectives together to learn, share, and create.
• As in the Kingwood story, it invited those with disabilities, and their caregivers, into the conversation in a meaningful way. In doing so, it changed the people who participated—they saw the world of disability in a different way and perhaps saw a new role for themselves.
• As with the community conversations in Kerry, it insisted that participants translate their ideas into concrete concepts and then make these concepts tangible and testable through prototyping.
• Finally, it gave a team the experience of laying out their design logic for others and allowed them to give and receive feedback.
We believe that, given the time and support to help the nascent Innovation Lab ideas seek commercialization through the planned incubator, Life Labs could have accelerated UCP’s mission to advance the independence of people with disabilities, enrich their lives, provide better support to their families, and advocate for their inclusion in every facet of community life.
We know that innovations sometimes fail, not because they don’t create value but because of timing, external changes in the environment, or internal changes in the organization. That is one of the reasons why we recommend keeping an inventory of ideas that don’t pass the What wows? and What works? tests on their first try. In our research, we consistently see ideas succeeding on their second—or even third—attempt. Hence, we expect to see the Life Labs concept resurrected in another time and place.
TOP DOWN VERSUS BOTTOM UP
The question of whether design thinking (or any change for that matter) should be driven from the top down or from the bottom up is an intriguing one in the innovation space. We touched on this in chapter 1 and will return to the subject in chapter 15. We are great believers in the power of grassroots efforts and have seen the impact that they can make. Many design champions are not waiting for senior leadership to give them permission to innovate. In fact, one great aspect of design thinking is its inherently subversive nature, and that nature is much in evidence in our research.
Bootstrapping strategies do succeed. These “stealth” strategies often are led by an intrepid band of design enthusiasts, take advantage of leadership indifference, and seek support from credible outside sponsors instead. They are framed in a way that is nonthreatening in an Innovation I world and are often portrayed as problem-solving strategies, without headlining “design thinking.” These early endeavors achieve small successes, provide data to argue for bigger moves, and build from there.
At the same time, internal management support is often crucial. Imagine Marliza Rivera’s Whiteriver project without the support of HHS’s Ignite Accelerator—success would have been unlikely. If anything were possible, we would like to see design thinking coming from both the top down and the bottom up.
But some lessons here do relate specifically to design thinking. Life Labs was not just the victim of circumstances beyond its control. UCP’s former chief operating officer, Chris Thomson, recalled the Life Labs experiment in positive terms but talked about the limits of merely raising awareness versus actually bringing products to market:
Life Labs was an incredibly inspired idea that ran into real-world problems. It was a very successful participant experience and very useful for spreading awareness and for helping us with the hacker-maker-builder community, but it never answered the questions around how to generate the revenues to sustain it. For getting people thinking about ideas, it was incredible, but for actually bringing products to market for people to help themselves, not so much.
What are the limits of creating great experiences? Even in a world where profitability is not an objective, designing an experience that gives careful thought to the underpinnings of a self-sustaining financial model in a predictable way is critical. That’s why we ask the What wows? question and insist that design thinkers take their prototypes to key stakeholders (and not just users) for feedback. All invention comes with risk, and no innovator can control all outside forces, but thinking through the financial viability of an idea, and not just its desirability, before significant resources are expended is needed.
As Josef reflected on his experience at Life Labs, he also shared concerns that spoke to the role of leadership and the need for a supportive context for such initiatives to succeed:
I don’t think these developments reflect on the mission of Life Labs, but I do believe that any design thinking initiative must be more than just a program that allows an organization to check off the “innovation” box. Design thinking needs to be embedded deeply into the ethos of the overall organizational mission, and this type of focus absolutely requires leadership from the top down or it risks ending up stale, unsupported, and, worse, misunderstood.
As design thinking gains popularity in both the business world and the social sector, it will face new challenges engendered by its burgeoning popularity. Josef mentioned these in our last conversation:
My concern with design thinking is that it has reached buzzword status and is largely misunderstood and misapplied as a panacea for every organization’s challenges. When it doesn’t work, the organization incorrectly places the blame on innovation and quickly moves on. My view is that design thinking is a highly valuable tool in a toolbox, but by no means a universal multitool. It needs to be used correctly and given support and time to work properly.
Like Josef, we worry. It is easy to allow our enthusiasm for design thinking to turn us into the infamous young boy with a hammer who sees nails everywhere he looks. As Jim Scully of ThinkPlace in New Zealand observed, “I worry when design thinking turns into a religion.” We see the explosion of interest in hackathons and workshops and sometimes wonder what will follow. One- and two-day events can provide an essential energy charge to inspire interest and get design thinking off the ground, but these need to be followed by more in-depth training in the tools and by the opportunity to apply the method in real time to real issues. Otherwise, as with so many organizational fads that we have seen come and go, people leave the workshop excited but then resort to business as usual when they find their desks swamped with work due yesterday.
Without disciplined attention to rigorous application of these methods and tools, and careful forethought about the back end of testing and experimentation in the real world, as well as the front end of empathy, design thinking will not live up to the promise we see in so many of our stories. Similarly, it is vital to enlist the support of key funders and to offer them a sustainable financing model; otherwise, even wonderful ideas created in carefully crafted processes will not see the light of day.
CHAPTER NINE
The Power of Local at the Community Transportation Association of America
THE CHALLENGE TO THE GREATER GOOD
“Think globally, act locally” is a phrase that we have come to accept as an almost universal truth. But what if it’s not always true? Mandated top-down solutions to deep-seated community problems often fail to take into account critical dimensions of the problem that only local knowledge reveals. What if thinking, as well as acting, locally is better? In this story, we see the power of local thinking about a tough issue: the transportation needs of low-income workers.
DESIGN THINKING’S CONTRIBUTION
Rather than defining a problem centrally and recommending implementation of broad initiatives, design thinking offers diverse community-based players the opportunity to jointly frame problems and form solutions rooted in the unique circumstances of their communities. The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) used design thinking as a guiding structure to empower local partners. Over a year, the association’s educators led seven local teams through the process together—sharing insights and observations as they went and creating the best of both worlds: local problem definition and solutions and shared learning.
Headquartered in Washington, DC, and working with local communities throughout the United States, the Community Transportation Association of America invites both organizations and individuals to join in achieving their mission of “c
reating mobility for all Americans regardless of where they live or work.” CTAA’s central focus is education and advocacy around transportation challenges facing citizens, especially seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, and low-income workers. Carolyn Jeskey, director of community engagement, calls herself “an educator and incentivizer” and has devoted twenty-plus years to transportation-related challenges. She explained why:
Our transportation system is good and serves millions of people every day, but there are many people with unique needs that current transportation services don’t yet serve well. The work that CTAA and I have been doing for all these years is working to create mobility that responds more empathetically to those with unmet needs. For instance, in a system that runs 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., how do you build a transportation system that works for people working a 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. shift? We’ve been advocating for better services for those whose needs have not yet been met, like trying to get services for aging in place and more self-sufficiency in lower-wage communities.
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