A few of us students from the class Concept and Product development went to Hilversum to attend the meeting about design and innovation in context of the financial crisis.
We arrived slightly late, but entered before the first speaker was up.
The way of this meeting had forum style.
I will write some stuff about the intersting things I’ve heard. There were quite some speakers so I will not name everyone.
Matthijs van Dijk.
He talked about his vision and ideas about automotive design.
I was very interested in the way he presented some conclusions. He told about that human beings are always
egocentric. As well, green products aren’t attractive. It doesn’t do anything for the perhaps potential buyers. Why pay more for something that can do the same for you.
Matthijs also tells us that there’s a lot of ‘innovation’, but no real innovation. This sounds confusing. He told that products always should be made to help people, for people, not the other way around. This also counts for innovation. If it doesn’t help the consumer, it’s not an innovation. The innovation should fulfill a need, everything else is just progress.
I must say that I really liked the way his vision was about this.
The second main thing where Matthijs was talking about was about encouraging to make greener products.
He told us that the government should pay more attention to what business were doing, and even letting them be greener, encourage them. Why the producer and not the consument? Well, as he just explained, people don’t go for green products because of anything it does for them. Some people might buy it to buy their guilt, but that’s not really a thing to support!
His key vision is to maintain balance together with collective social needs.
Bas Roelofs, Berg Toys
The insights of Bas Roelofs was quite nice . He told about how he worked for some companies, and now as marketeer for Berg Toys.
He explained how that company was started from one man who made skelters for his friends. And he thought he could earn a few bucks for it, and started his company.
A few years later, the company did booming business. After some time, near the start of the financial crisis the products were selling less and less, and they needed to innovate.
Bas was asked to help them to innovate, because they were all techies, and they didn’t know why.
So Bas let a lot of the head staff go to schools and see what they were doing, talking to them. Quality research in the target group.
From soapbox to skelter, but unfortunately, the skelters they had before were all a set bunch of products who people couldn’t modify.
As result of their researched, they made a new concept called “Moov”. These are wooden skelters you can modify and make any thing you like.It’s also made from durable products.
The Moov was a hit, and they started to extend the productrange with accessoires you can ‘pimp’ your own sketler with, and models like a Ferarri-like one as top-range.
Carel van Houte, CitizenM
The story Carel told was very intersting. He gave us the process of how they realized the concept of CitizenM.
CitizenM is a hotel made out of portacabins. It’s meant for the always traveling businessmen and women who want the luxury without all the proclaimed extra luxury like a minibar. Just a few staff, that’s it. The check-in and payment is going all through the website -without the hassle-. Making it fast and cheaper.
The portacabins are nearly completely made in a factory. When the hotel is being built up at the airport, they just staple the portacains and add the power and water supply with some extra services. There’s a few people working in every hotel placed to remain low in price. Every needed thing there was. A simple bar downstairs, (wifi)internet, television and bedroom.
Also this hotel is made from durable products.
The brainstorm from the audience
Brainstorming with the audience. This was a bit where I’ve been waiting for. Was curious how they were going to do it. They had a quite strange method. You have to write the lesson down whatwe’ve learned today.
Mathijs van Meerkerk and I wrote down the following: “It’s about people, and not technologies, systems, etcetera”.
Then we needed to pass or written lesson to someone else to judge it. This went on for about 5 times.
After a short break, the results were being count and discussed. Apparently, we were number 3 of 100+ people.
It’s an interesting thing if you’re on an innovation platform, and you are in an audience who are all either innovation managers or wanting to become, and you’re there as student.
Im not really sure if it’s hard to change your way of thinking when you’re older, or too settled in your enviroment and way of doing, or perhaps our theoretical background. I’ll leave that to the readers of this article 
After this sessions, some other people were debating on the stage. Those people were announced on the program. This wasn’t too interesting, except the examples CitizenM and Berg Toys showed then.
I have to admit that I expected a bit more than what I’ve heard that day. However…I always feel that attending such meetings is a good idea. This because you will always learning something, or get some new ideas!
, always look too young like this!
