Building Expertise Through Collective Innovation

The Raymond open-innovation conference gathered design managers from companies such as Heineken and Lego to share best practices and improve the bottom line

by Kerry Capell

Open innovation has been a hot management phrase for the past five years. So far, though, these collaborations have generally been focused on small-scale research and development, or technology ventures between giant global brands and smaller partners. Think Proctor & Gamble's (PG) collaborations with universities and suppliers or IBM's (IBM) embrace of an open-source software language which both saves the company money and provides it with a new revenue stream.

But what if you brought together design heads from some of the world's biggest global brands with the aim of stimulating innovation? That was the premise of the fifth annual Raymond conference on Feb. 28 and 29 in Rotterdam attended by 17 design managers from companies as diverse as Heineken, Philips, Lego, Airbus, and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Designers are accustomed to working with external consultants and customers, but Raymond's aim is different: fostering cooperation between design teams at big global companies in radically different markets.

The conference is the brainchild of two Dutch design companies: Park Advanced Design Management and Eden, an interactive-experience design firm. Tired of attending crowded conferences dominated by endless speeches, they decided to start an invitation-only event five years ago where designers from non-competing companies could freely share ideas with the aim of finding new ways to get more and better products out faster.

An Imaginary Global Firm

"Everyone talks about open innovation but the design department is the place within a company most open to doing it," says Raymond co-founder and Park director Tim Selders. That's because designers, especially those involved in corporate branding and product or service design, are accustomed to working with external partners and customers. "It's about finding new ways for companies to share design processes, resources, and tools," continues Selders.

This year's Raymond conference followed an unusual format that led to some surprising insights and even a few potential commercial collaborations. Holed up together in a room for nearly two days, the attendees, including design world luminaries Clive Grinyer, director of product design at Orange France Telecom who founded design consultancy Tangerine with Apple's (AAPL) Jonathan Ive in 1989; and Philippe Picaud, head of design at French sports retailer Decathlon, were asked to imagine they were part of a new global design company called design-Inc.com, with a team of some 1,200 designers.

Their mission, they were informed in a video presentation by the unseen "Raymond" (think Charlie from Charlie's Angels) was to deliver the best, fastest, and most inexpensive design solutions for a broad range of businesses across a variety of industries: medical, retail, toys, sports equipment, and clothing.

The Spirit of a Collective Company

To do this, they had to figure out how to motivate staff to keep innovation fresh, which design tools and processes to use, how to benchmark their performance, and how to share knowledge of trends, materials, and technologies among designers.