Herts LEP - RCA Service Innovation Course

I was chatting to our neighbour here in Tring, Louse Towler of Indigo Tree and she told me she’d just signed up for a free course starting in a couple of weeks - a Service Innovation Programme run by Herts Local Enterprise Partnership.  I normally don’t go near free courses but this one sounded rather good.

A quick Google search later and I found the website, signed up and went for it.  The course was a pilot practitioner programme being run jointly by the Royal College of Art (RCA) and ESTU Global.

It was a ten weeklong programme with one lecture per week and some course work to be done between sessions.  The programme was delivered by the experienced team from RCA led by Nick de Leon and featured Nick and number of great guest speakers – more below. 

I treated it as a chance to refresh some skills, learn some new techniques and really get involved with my fellow students.

Course Leaders

I’m not sure if it’s just the fact that this was the pilot programme or if we got lucky, but the standard of the lectures and lecturers was excellent throughout.  The main lecturers were:

Nick de Leon of Royal College of Art 

Nick is Executive Education and Knowledge Exchange Lead in the Royal College of Art School of Design, where he leads the development of the school’s research and knowledge exchange relations. 

Clive Grinyer of Royal College of Art 

Clive is an acknowledged expert in service design, design thinking and digital and technology innovation who has led award-winning design teams for companies around the globe. 

Simon Littlewood: Estu 

Simon is the CEO of Estu, a Leadership & Development business with programmes proven to deliver business results & personal growth for learners. 

Guests Speakers

We also had several great guest speakers over the course including:

Rikesh Shah: Head of Commercial Innovation at TFL

Responsible for TFL’s world leading open data strategy with over 700 apps linked to TFL data and over 42% of Londoners.

Yao Yingjia, VP and Chief Design Officer

CDO or the world’s largest PC company - Lenovo, designer of the Olympic Torch for Beijing 2008, and about to take up a new role with a UK based historic car company.

Content

The course could be described as a light version of the RCA Service Design MA.  The structured programme covered:

• New models of innovation
• Transforming the customer value for the “new normal”
• Digital transformation and data enabled Innovation.
• A Creative workshop
• Business model innovation and creating a compelling value proposition.
• A Tutorial: creating an integrated service proposition and business model.
• Your business as a platform and creating an innovation platform.
• Translating your new service proposition into an investable business plan
• Tutorial: putting it all together to deliver an integrated value proposition
• The Grand Finale

A lot of the course was practical, and we were given a problem area to explore.  My group, Chris Tredget from Willmot Dixon, Sculptor Lee Simmons, Josh Kubale of Herts Wildlife Trust and myself were given the problem of circular economy and we decided to concentrate on construction.

We were given the chance to research, explore ideas, define the problem and present a solution. It’s fair to say we had a blast and came up with some pretty solid ideas.  Everybody loved our graphic equaliser cost vs impact analysis tool. And although we may never get to build it for real, we all benefitted from the chance to contribute and help with the solution.

Our Final Project

Across the course we learnt several useful design techniques from crazy 8’s to business model canvases.  I’ll cover some of these in a future blog post.

Outcomes

Prior to this course I primarily thought of myself as a digital product designer.  The tools and techniques I’ve learnt have given me the confidence to look at the larger service picture and get involved in wider discussions. 

This will be invaluable to our existing customers and internally as we aim to start building our own products within the next 18 months.

In addition, the people I’ve met on the course and got the chance to work with have been great and have introduced us to several new opportunities.

Overall, highly recommended.

Learn More

https://www.hertfordshirelep.com/business/innovation-programmes/service-innovation/