Artefacts of Innovation

“What is needed is a better understanding of the contextual settings in which innovation”  - Original Project Call for Participation

R&D teams innovate. In the case of Philips Research researchers are involved with Front End Innovation (FEI). Teams go out and WORK. They do all kinds of research, it may be technical, it may be user studies, it may be desk research, but they go and do it.

A team will then return and report to an internal stakeholder, AKA a customer, and attempt to get some kind of action. This is ‘selling’ their work and their results. They do this through the things they make such as: prototypes, sketches, presentations, reports, etc.

These things I call Artefacts (or Artifacts if you prefer).

These Artefacts then need to span from the team across organizational boundaries to the customer, making it a boundary object. The aim of my current research is to study, understand, and IMPROVE communication from (designerly and/or R&D) teams with customers.