Prototyping & Creativity workshops in China & Japan

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!

On going creativity Workshop

Service by Voice prototype testing in action

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.

Jam IT – First Innovation Jam session@Volvo IT

Between the 20th and 24th of September we executed our first global Innovation Jam event ever – Jam IT. Colleagues all over the globe participated and collaborated  - connecting both cultures and functions within the Volvo group. To frame the ideation we selected three specifc topics in which all participants could input their thouhgts, observations ans ideas.

Creative ideas ranged from warehouse simulators and mobile fleet-tracking applications to ways of reducing our carbon footprint and delivering solutions designed for the emerging markets.

If I were to sum up the first Jam IT event with some specific words I would say the following:

Mind Blowing, Energy, Creativity, Collaboration, Openness and Engagement.

Colleagues from the different corners of the world interacted to build on each others ideas with an open mindset and a energetic approach. During the entire week all participants had the possibility to invest in the ideas that they believed would bring value to our customers. By utilizing the Idea market we could also in the end of the week present a list of the top 20 ideas – selected by all colleagues that participated in the event.

The top 20 ideas are right now being reviewed by a cross functional review panel with an aim to select a minimum of 2 ideas that we will explore further using the prototyping process.

Some figures from the first JAM IT event

  • Number of views – 33 806
  • Unique visitors: 1876
  • Number of ideas: 274
  • Contributors(Comments & Ideas): 236
  • Engagement thorugh investments/voting: 794

I would like to say THANK YOU to all Facilitators, Collegues and the Coordination team that made this event possible! Now we need to follow through and initiate the first crowd sourced prototypes within Volvo IT.

 


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