Prototyping & Creativity workshops in China & Japan

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Tommy Hansson

After two full weeks of travelling and working together with collegues in China and Japan I feel energized! The creativity workshops in Beijing, Shanghai and Ageo together with our collegues generated many, many ideas adopted to the local market needs. I remember that Kerstin and I tried to keep up with documenting all ideas about new services and applications for the aftermarket & Softproducts teams - sessions like this really gives me energy!

Many discussions we had during the trip was about reversed innovation and also how we could utilize the exponential growth on the consumer market to find solutions, consumerization, suitable for the local markets in Asia.
During a lunch at a restaurant close to the office in Beijing I noticed that the waiter used a standard feature phone and tapped in all our order in an application on the phone – this is exatcly the solutions that we need to explore and reverse back to the western countries. Using consumer products and applications inside the business processes would most certain allow us to develop solutions to a lower cost and with accepted functionally. A similar mindset and resoning that we used when developing our prototypes, Service by Voice and Connected Mechanic, that we tested at the Beijing walker dealership – enabling the mechanics to access service instruction via a smartphone application.