journal
A conversation about collaboration and transformative innovation with Christian Villum, Director of Digital & Future Thinking at the Danish Design Centre.
From helping companies to develop design-led methodologies to exploring the future of technology, health and economy, the Danish Design Center, based in Copenhagen is Denmark’s powerhouse of innovation. We spoke to Christian Villum, the center’s Director of Future Thinking about scanning beyond the horizon, the importance of open collaboration, and the untapped potential of science fiction as a tool for transformative futures.
My job is to work across all of our different platforms, which are work streams that each relate to a professional topic such as health, city development or entrepreneurship, as an example. We have five in total. Across all of them, I scan for new opportunities, mainly those concerning new technologies, but also to conceptualise efforts in relation to new trends for our partners. After that, I then fundraise for money to put these ideas into action.
Because I work in the development pipeline, my success is measured against how many programmes we can initiate. The bottom line across all of this is spotting technological trends but not just as they appear on the horizon – rather, trying to spot them sooner than that. Beyond the horizon you could say!
As soon as we pick up on a big trend or idea, we immediately reach out to the people who are already doing work in that space.
It’s about staying on top of the waves. I use the power of our network and talk a lot to people that come to us, and measure their insights with what I’m seeing online and the patterns that I’m tracking. What appears to be an opportunity? What interesting ways can we activate companies in an effort to increase their economic growth and job creation?
As soon as we pick up on a trend or big idea, we immediately reach out to the people who are already doing work in that space and then initiate a process of brainstorming and potential cocreation to find out if there's a mutual interest in pursuing something together. Then we continue to broaden the circle until it has a volume that carries some weight with it, and if the idea is good, we start validating it against end users as the next step. We like mocking up quick prototypes, which can be anything from a one pager to some kind of physical object, and then taking that prototype into the hands of whoever is the intended audience. We analyse whether they benefit from whatever it is, and if we are told that it’s stupid then we go back to the drawing board to recalibrate and then later do another round. Sometimes we even invite end users to join us in the process, in order to make sure that the next iteration works.
After that, we then continue validating the idea until it's mature enough to be something we know there is a demand for. Then of course we find some money to do it, or in our case, we get companies on board that we would like to see execute it. We're very much the role of a facilitator.
We have a communications team here but they work more as a support function. In many cases, especially for the kind of pipeline of development work that I do, I mainly use my own channels. We have a principle here called ‘open by default’, which ties in with the kind of organisation that we are as a non-profit. Given that half of our budget comes from tax money, we have an obligation to create as much value as possible. As part of that mandate, we've applied Creative Commons licences on everything that we do, which means that we're always super keen to put everything out there and see it used by others. I'm a strong proponent of open sharing and whatever you put out there others can take and use and build upon that. As an organisation, that's how we try to work.
Innovation is a current within itself, and something that no longer happens in silos - it happens in between them. In order to really benefit from that, you need to put your own ideas out there in order to assist others.
By keeping ideas to yourself, you're holding yourself back. The secret sauce is application.
Yes, exactly. Some governments are the biggest innovation engines that we have today, particularly because of their budgets. But when we think of startups for example, many of them are reluctant to actually share their ideas, and I always say that there's probably 100 or 200 others at the moment pursuing the exact same idea. By keeping ideas to yourself, you're holding yourself back. The secret sauce is application and putting something in motion. It's much easier to let it flow and have other people come and help you than trying to do it all by yourself.
Absolutely. It happened by chance in the sense that we could easily have done ‘open by default’ without doing REMODEL, or vice versa. You can think about it as an effort to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. It’s one of the big trends that we're pursuing at the moment, not just looking at technologies but also the social shifts that propel innovation forward. I think the open source mindset is just so pervasive, and really expanding in all directions at the moment, whether you're looking at how Google builds their business or how governments open their data logs to strengthen innovation. It’s a really strong way to harness the power of the internet.
As part of the research that I've been doing, when I was in the ‘horizon scanning’ phase, it started to become very clear to me how the open source approach is exploding at the moment. It's a growing mega trend, particularly because it's moving from the software world out into other kinds of fields, including hardware. I've just been putting together a large collection of case studies of companies all over the world who have gone open to some degree, in order to strengthen their innovation and scale their business. I wanted to test that out in a Danish context, so that's why we put together a programme where 10 companies could try to open source one of their existing hardware products. We did that as a design sprint over the course of three months, and we mapped out the whole journey for those companies.
By the end, we put together this universal applicable toolkit that allowed anyone else to do the same thing. That was our sort of pilot testing but it also became a stepping stone towards other things. We now have a couple of new EU funded efforts that build on REMODEL which I could talk for hours about, but the short version is simply just that it was our way of testing the waters and sharing with the world.
We're just trying to stand on the shoulders of giants.
I think it was one of the first one’s that was specifically targeted to hardware. There are a lot of other smaller tools and tool kits out there that can help you open source such as looking at the work of The Open Source Hardware Association in the US or The Open Source Observatory. We're basically just trying to stand on the shoulders of giants and build on that. A lot of people have then continued to build on our work, and I'm thankful to say I think it resonated with a lot of people.
It’s important to remember that the things we make will influence the future.
I picked up on the idea of science fiction thinking as a tool for corporate innovation by talking to a woman called Ann Rosenberg. She is the Vice President of SAP, a software company, and they have an arm called Next Gen, which is their talent development division. Ann is Danish but based out of New York, and she wrote a book about science fiction thinking which outlines the idea of how corporations can use science fiction thinking as a tool for innovation. I was really interested in that, so we invited Ann over and did a meet up on it, which then became the beginning of a series of meetups to explore science fiction thinking as a corporate innovation tool. But do we want to do it in a Danish context, as the book that she wrote was very US-centric? I think we need to consider our approach to how we develop technology in the Nordic Region, as well as a critical approach towards how technology influences people and the responsibility that manufacturers have.
I believe science fiction future thinking can lead us to make more responsible products, which means it is totally worth pursuing and relevant for any individual or company trying to navigate the future in a responsible way. It’s important to remember that the things we make will influence the future. Unless you spend time really speculating and mapping out all of the different directions you can go, how will you ever be able to steer?