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Empathic facilitation for enhancing customer-oriented innovation
Tero MontonenPäivi Eriksson Hanna Lehtimäki
ICMC2014
Bimtech, India
The Fuzzy Front End
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NOVEL IDEAS
CONCEPTSPROTOTYPES
LAUNCHDEVELOPMENT
Traditional product development
CONTEXT OF THE CASE: THE INNOVATION PROCESS
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How to make the Fuzzy Front End more customer-
oriented?
Innovation and positive
organizational scholarship.
THE FOCUS OF OUR INTEREST
What is the relevance of empathy in innovation?
EMPATHY IN INNOVATION
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Empathy is the ability to take
another person’s perspective and understand their
needs. It also means willingness to help
others.
Innovation is about providing solutions
for other people’s problems and
needs
The Innovation Empathy (Inpatia) project
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The aim is to develop and test a new
Innovation Empathy Model in collaboration
with companies
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The Innovation Empathy Model
1st and 2nd rounds of development and testing
Emphasis on doing empathy exercises
•The 1st round: Student innovators were fairly satisfied with the process and results (Asikainen et al. 2013), but we were not
•The 2nd round: Company and consultant innovators were not satisfied wit the process and results, nor were we
Our conclusion:
Too little facilitation, too much reliance on empathy exercises to do the job
How working with the model should be facilitated?
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3rd and 4th rounds of development and testing
More emphasis on empathic facilitation; initiating and maintaining
a dialogue with innovators (with questions, comments, reflection
and feed back).
Both facilitators and company innovators were more satisfied with
the process and results.
Our conclusion:
Practice what you preach facilitators need to take innovators as
their customers, and use the same three forms of empathy
(cognitive, affective and helping) with both
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CONCLUSIONS FROM THE CASE
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The FFE can be made more customer-oriented with increasing levels of empathy
Empathic facilitation (or hosting, convening…) is a key element of the Innovation Empathy Model
Cognitive and affective empathy and helping
behaviour are key ingredients of
innovation processes
Thank you!
www.uef.fi/inpatia
