Collaborating to improve lives through innovation

October 18th 2023

Abby Scheer

Associate Industrial Designer & FemTech Lead

Martha Hodgson

Senior Insight and Strategy Consultant

Over the last few years, Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) has developed a strategic partnership with MAS Holdings, South Asia’s largest apparel tech company.

Our most recent collaboration has been with Femography, the FemTech division of MAS Holdings, which started out as a small team with diverse expertise, and has evolved into the FemTech arm of the Company. Femography leverages 35 years of apparel tech expertise and works with some of the world’s biggest brands to create innovative apparel solutions that focus on addressing the unseen and unmet needs of women. These innovative solutions are breaking taboos through their textile technology and mission-led practices. The partnership between CDP and Femography combines ingenuity and cross-disciplinary approaches to rapidly create and expand access to impactful women’s health solutions.

Our partnership with Femography was focused on the identification of white space opportunities within menstruation. This leveraged our combined passion and commitment to innovation within the women’s health space. The outcome resulted in a creative solution pipeline which has extended and elevated Femography’s product pipeline.

In this article, Abby Scheer, an Industrial Designer and FemTech Lead at CDP, reflects on the importance of strategic partnerships with Femography’s Tehani Renganathan and Ginnymarie Mendis, and shares exciting key learnings for successful innovation across the FemTech space.

The role of strategic partnerships in successful FemTech innovation

Strategic partnerships provide multi-faceted value, especially in driving innovation that helps transform lives. The partnership between CDP and Femography includes a shared vision that challenges taboos and pre-existing social norms surrounding the female body and increases the discovery and development of impactful solutions.

“We partnered with companies and consultants who really shared that vision, they were vested in this journey with us – and it is that success that we see the fruit of today.” – Tehani Renganathan, Chief of Strategy, Marketing and New Ventures, Femography

Backed by science and approved by women, Femography designs everyday lifestyle solutions across all phases of the feminine journey – from menarche to menopause and everything in-between. Femography’s solutions are created to help women live confidently in their bodies, but many taboos continue surrounding feminine health and well-being.

“Our efforts aren’t focused on creating just a regular clothing/apparel solution, but to also look at solving unmet and undermet needs of our consumers. We have understood the many pain points they journey through, and we are continuously working towards giving them a passive or active solution that can restore normalcy for them.” — Ginnymarie Mendis, Chief of Consumer and Product Innovation, Femography.

Strategic collaborations with insightful partners increase the breadth and depth of discovery and development of impactful solutions – this is especially important in the FemTech space where research and funding is often lacking. Femography approached CDP for expertise in the consumer health and technology space, and together we met this menstrual health challenge head-on.

Building a successful strategic partnership

Drawing on her firsthand experience, Ginny shared how a successful partnership should have “…mutual trust, respect, and a shared vision and commitment to the journey”. When it comes to innovation, it is also important to have a creative partner who can help bring early ideas and concepts to life as fast as possible. CDP’s innovation, efficiency, and approach were a foundational aspect of the partnership formed between CDP and Femography.

“We wanted to bridge our strengths with your [CDP’s] strengths and come up with even greater solutions and innovations that could really have an incremental impact on our planet” – Ginnymarie Mendis.

Femography also recognizes that strategic partnerships are key to successfully expanding its existing portfolio into everyday periodwear and even period swimwear in a meaningful way. When looking to expand into new customer markets across, for example, US, EU, Australia, and Asia, fine-tuning product categories is key.

The FemTech knowledge, cross-cutting sector expertise, and user-centered design approaches which CDP brings to their strategic partnerships has helped to unlock how existing solutions can meet users’ needs and support the rapid discovery of transformative solutions for growing women’s health issues.

New innovation opportunities in FemTech apparel

Reflecting on our recent collaboration, Tehani highlighted the exciting and anticipated new opportunities which can be created and unlocked due to our partnership.

“The CDP and Femography partnership will help create and unlock access to non-medical alternatives to help women better manage their health. An important objective includes exploring a broad product landscape, creating a pipeline of global solutions mapped to symptoms and other pain points women struggle with.” -Tehani Renganathan.

Equally, Tehani reflected on a fantastic launch that the Femography team is exceptionally proud of. Become, the consumer-facing menopause brand of Femography that was launched in the UK almost 7 years ago, was transformational in helping to get the menopause conversation started. Become frequently partners with other brands and organizations to lead change, providing another great example of the importance of innovation collaborations. This year Femography has expanded the Become footprint to the US market to leverage American women’s vocal conversations on menopause, increase awareness of the topic, and provide a solution to women who need it.

What next?

Much more work is still needed to address the health needs of women in the UK and US, and even more so in many developing and underprivileged communities. The collaboration between CDP and Femography continues to help innovate and expand the reach of unique solutions in women’s health across each sub-sector market. Together, CDP and Femography will strive to collaboratively innovate meaningful products, to help bring greater health, dignity, and confidence to all feminine bodies.

Emotion by design

June 23rd 2022

Ben Strutt

Partner

Martha Hodgson

Senior Insight and Strategy Consultant

Jessica Platt

Market and Design Insights Researcher

WEBINAR

Emotion by design: Creative leadership lessons from a life at Nike

With Martha Hodgson

23 JUN 2021

As part of GIF 2022 Virtual edition, Martha Hodgson (senior insight and strategy innovation consultant) spoke to Greg Hoffman (author and ex-CMO at Nike) about the moment of inspiration that led him to Nike, how the mantra of ‘dream bigger’ has influenced him, and the art and science of innovation.

Complete the form below to watch the webinar

The three pillars of FemTech success: #2 Experience-led design

March 10th 2022

Cambridge Design Partnership

In the first of a series of articles covering the three pillars of our FemTech philosophy, we discussed inclusivity. Here, we move on to experience-led design, before ending with the smart use of technology.

Product innovation is shifting focus – from making things to designing seamless experiences. An experience-led design process leads to simple, intuitive, and enjoyable solutions, increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

How a user feels when using a product or service is becoming as important (if not more so) than the solution itself. More than ever, themes such as brand ethical position, purpose, and sustainability credentials are influencing where consumers place their cash and their loyalties. To address this, FemTech innovators must do three things:

Understand external influences
Focus on the end-to-end user experience
Leverage multi-disciplinary perspectives

Understand external influences

Understanding what drives change in the consumer and healthcare space is vital. The challenge for FemTech innovators is to understand how these factors will affect user expectations and behavior.

Take environmental factors: ‘flushability’ has long been a selling point for hygiene products, such as wipes and sanitaryware. However, some manufacturers have drawn historical criticism for stretching the technical definition of flushable to what may be sent on its way with the press of a lever. ‘Solubility’ is a more meaningful definition in the context of the environment and related consumer aspirations. These criteria are determined by industry standards such as Water Industry Specification (WIS) 4-02-06, ‘Fine to Flush’, and other standards with similar objectives across different international legislative jurisdictions.

Sanitary disposal bag firm Fab Little Bags is banking on consumer sentiment changing amid increasing awareness of water pollution. By providing a way to dispose of a tampon in a way that aligns with changing environmental beliefs – binning is better than flushing – it removes eco-guilt and improves the end-user experience.

Regulation is another factor that could affect user experience. If users know that a product, such as a fertility monitor, has been medically approved, they may feel more confident when entrusting it with a potentially life-changing task.

Focus on the end-to-end user experience

User experience isn’t limited to using a product or service but encompasses the whole consumer journey, including product research, purchase, delivery, unboxing, and after-life.

Consumers have ‘Moments of Truth’ during this journey – key points when they form an impression of a brand – and emotional and social drivers can have equal, if not overriding influence, over functional ones. The Zero Moment of Truth occurs during pre-purchase research. The intimate wellbeing e-commerce platform, Bloomi, which screens every product against a checklist of banned ingredients to ensure they meet its clean standards, recognizes the importance of this stage. The attention to the customer experience is continued with the promise of delivery in discreet packaging. Bloomi has designed a customer experience free of anxiety about harmful ingredients and privacy by considering elements of the user journey beyond use.

Leverage multi-disciplinary perspectives

User experience isn’t the remit of front-end innovation alone. Harnessing a multi-disciplinary team allows for a wealth of experience, perceptions, and viewpoints to be incorporated into the end-to-end design process. For example, our designers and engineers accompanied our research team to hear first-hand the frustrations women have when undertaking a breast cancer biopsy. This ensured that we could design an accurate medical tool and an empathetic user experience.

Certain environments, such as innovation sprint programs and start-up incubators, foster multi-disciplinary design. FemTech Labs, the first FemTech accelerator in Europe, is one example. It brings together experts, investors, and business coaches to kickstart FemTech businesses. The FemTech Lab accelerator program is short and intense, supplying opportunities for participants to grow quickly and sustainably by drawing on the expertise of its comprehensive interdisciplinary network.

As we’ve seen from the above examples, many FemTech companies are already prioritizing experience-led design as part of their development process. One of the mentioned case studies, Fab Little Bags, doesn’t ostensibly have any tech in it, which brings us to our upcoming article: the smart use of technology.

References

FLB’s Mission [Internet]. FabLittleBag HQ. [cited 14 February 2022]. Available from: https://fablittlebag.com/pages/about
Banned List [Internet]. Bloomi. [cited 14 February 2022]. Available from: https://thebloomi.com/pages/the-banned-list
FemTechLab – European FemTech Accelerator [Internet]. FemTechLab. [cited 14 February 2022]. Available from: https://femtechlab.com/

Connect with CDP

For more on how to design inclusive, experience-led FemTech products that meet the real needs of women, contact Cambridge Design Partnership.

Get in touch

The three pillars of FemTech success: #1 Inclusivity

January 28th 2022

Cambridge Design Partnership

Welcome to the first in a series of articles outlining the three pillars of our FemTech philosophy: inclusion, experience-led design, and the smart integration of technology. Here, we start with inclusion, a crucial topic for success in innovation.

While there are initiatives to ensure gender diversity in the boardroom, there’s rarely the same in product development. This need for equilibrium has historically often been overlooked in market research and product testing, resulting in design that misses a proportion of end-users. For example, it wasn’t until 2011 that female crash test dummies were introduced in the US.

There are three steps to achieving inclusivity in end-to-end innovation:

Understand the problem
Understand the context
Understand the ecosystem

Understand the problem

We use an Insights for Innovation approach underpinned by the ‘jobs to be done’ perspective. This focuses on understanding a task or ‘job’ independently of any existing solutions used to achieve it. This means we start with the problem rather than the solution. For example, our starting question is: ‘What needs might a couple have when trying for a baby?’ (the jobs), rather than ‘How can we design a biometrics tracker to gauge fertility?’ (a solution).

This solution-agnostic approach involves defining a ‘job’ in terms of the user’s functional, emotional, and social needs, for example:

The functional need to ‘know when I’m ovulating’
The emotional need to ‘feel like conception is a natural process’

An excellent example of a solution that has fulfilled these needs is Inne. This fertility monitoring system uses saliva to detect ovulation. Saliva analysis can help women increase the chance of falling pregnant (functional need) by identifying the fertile window each month. It offers clear feedback to reduce anxiety around the results (emotional need) and comes in a discreet format, allowing women to keep their fertility journey private, if they wish to.

Understand the context

FemTech teams must take research beyond quantitative surveys to truly have a clear idea of a woman’s needs. This requires in-depth qualitative interviews to understand women as part of a contextual system. This recognizes that women don’t buy a product because of who they are; no two women are the same; the same person can have different needs in different contexts.

We believe the team behind the breastmilk expresser Elvie Pump took this approach by considering the context of when it would be used, for example, while running after a child or in the workplace. This revealed needs far beyond extracting milk.

Historically, breast pumps have been cumbersome and noisy, with long tubes that significantly restrict movement. On the other hand, Elvie Pump’s design is hands-free, silent, cordless, and easy to clean. By addressing context, the design became a market leader in the US and UK.

Understand the ecosystem

Understanding the ‘job to be done’ as part of an ecosystem helps multi-disciplinary teams consider the experience of other key stakeholders.

Take the example of contraception; a heterosexual couple might have the same emotional need to ‘feel like contraception is natural’. However, to one, it could mean hormone-free cream; to the other, it might mean no physical intervention at all (for example, relying on a fertility monitor). Addressing the need from different perspectives ensures the solution is meaningful, intuitive, and enjoyable for everyone it impacts.

The Maven Clinic is a telehealth platform that offers fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and family care services. It caters to what would largely be considered female needs. However, 30% of its members are men. Founder Kate Ryder is careful not to exclude them when she talks about the platform. Rather than referring to Maven Clinic as FemTech, she defines her mission in terms of “people” to ensure that all members feel included.

As these examples show, inclusivity is an essential ingredient of FemTech success. The following articles in our series will cover why experience-led design and the smart integration of technology are equally important.

References

Criado Perez C. The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes [Internet]. The Guardian. 2019 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes
Science [Internet]. Inne.io. 2022 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.inne.io/en/science
Elvie Pump: from idea to execution [Internet]. Elvie. 2019 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.elvie.com/en-gb/blog/elvie-pump-from-idea-to-execution
Srivastava A. British femtech Elvie lands £58M funding for its smart breast pumps and more – UKTN | UK Tech News | [Internet]. UKTN | UK Tech News |. 2021 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.uktech.news/news/british-femtech-elvie-funding-20210727
Maven – The next generation of care for women and families [Internet]. Mavenclinic.com. 2022 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.mavenclinic.com/
Pallarito K. ‘Femtech’ Is Busting Taboos Around Women’s Health and Wellness—But What Is It Exactly? [Internet]. Health.com. 2020 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.health.com/mind-body/femtech-womens-health

Connect with CDP

For more on how to design inclusive, experience-led FemTech products that meet the real needs of women, contact Cambridge Design Partnership.

Get in touch

The key to FemTech success? Forget about the tech

July 9th 2021

Jessica Platt

Market and Design Insights Researcher

Martha Hodgson

Senior Insight and Strategy Consultant

Ben Strutt

Partner

Nicki Sutton

Senior innovation consultant

From contraception to catheters, at CDP we’ve successfully pioneered women’s health innovation for over a decade.

Now that increasing numbers of our clients are entering the $19bn¹ FemTech market, we’re in a strong position to share some powerful lessons from our established approach to inclusive design.

Refocus your lens

Fertility entrepreneur, Ida Tin, coined the term ‘FemTech’ in 2016 in a frustrated bid to explain her work to male investors. The resulting discussion revealed the breath-taking extent to which the marketplace is short-changing women.

Despite decades of progress in gender equality, product development (until very recently) has operated through a male lens. It wasn’t, for example, until 1993 that the US National Institute of Health made it obligatory to include women in government-funded health research. This lack of data has resulted in a significant knowledge gap in women’s health, meaning that female patients have missed out on critical advances in medical technology.

And it wasn’t just men’s bodies that were the default; it was also the male viewpoint. Take the launch of Apple Health in 2014. The much-anticipated app promised to monitor “all of your metrics that you’re most interested in”. Yet it omitted a menstrual cycle tracking function². This is arguably something of great interest to 50% of its users. It wasn’t until a year and a lot of media pressure later that developers added it in.

Fight assumption with insight

The Apple Health oversight could have been avoided by one simple step – asking women what they thought.

At CDP, we believe the key to design inclusivity lies in a strong front-end innovation (FEI) capability. FEI is the identification and activation of opportunities, and the translation of insights into product and service solutions. This is the function that feeds insight into strategy, design, and specification. Importantly, it can guide decisions made later in the product development cycle.

To put a woman’s needs at the center of a brief, teams must take research beyond quantitative surveys. A mere tick box won’t capture the emotional and social circumstances in which a product is used.

For example, could the tone and volume of the beep that a basal fertility thermometer emits first thing in the morning (when it must be used) be so grating that it results in lower levels of compliance?

We recommend in-depth qualitative interviews to understand people as part of a contextual system, rather than groups of personas. Categorizing a user as a “32-year-old soccer mom from California” fails to capture the nuances of when, where, and how a product is used. As an aside, it also turns out that women take a dim view of being pigeonholed, as a former boss of UK retail chain Marks & Spencer discovered when (to female shoppers’ outrage) he described its typical customer as “Mrs M&S”³.

Where possible, we engage in immersive, ethnographic methodologies – seeing people in their cultural setting, often at home – to uncover user needs. This extends to international travel to understand the cultural contexts that inform decision making in different markets.

Futureproof for regulation

As a young sector, it’s no surprise that there are grey areas when it comes to the regulation of FemTech.

This is slowly changing as FemTech creeps into the realm of (regulated) medical devices. In 2018, Natural Cycles was the first digital birth control app to receive clearance from the FDA; fertility pioneer Clue was the second in March 2021.

Somewhat shockingly, regulation for sex toys doesn’t extend beyond the electrical compliance required for a Bluetooth speaker, escaping more stringent scrutiny through a “novelty use” labelling loophole.

Again, this is set to change, with the ISO making progress towards new standards⁴. Until this is finalized, the regulation of medical devices provides a good clue as to what action is needed to futureproof FemTech.

On a recent sex toy project, CDP ensured that all materials were biocompatible, although no regulations required it. Not only was this the right thing in terms of reducing risk for the user, but also protected our client against potential changes in regulation.

Forget about the tech

It may sound counterintuitive, but at CDP we feel the best way to succeed in FemTech is to forget the tech…at first, anyway. This is where we often see both big corporates and startups trip up.

We recommend a “solution agnostic” approach to design – that’s to say starting with a user need and looking for the best way to fulfil it. This might involve tech; it might not. Even then, the “tech” might not necessarily be digital, which is often what comes to mind when we think of FemTech. Instead, it might focus on the device itself, the manufacturing process, choice of material, or service. Whatever the solution, this method establishes early on if there is a market and business case for a product.

The alternative is “tech for tech’s sake”: just because it’s possible to measure the veracity of the female orgasm doesn’t mean that women want this data, as a startup that claimed to “spot women’s orgasms” found out when it was widely lampooned in the media⁵.

On this, it’s worth noting that we don’t see FemTech as limited to the fields of sex or fertility. The same contextual and experiential empathy that goes into designing for these areas must also be applied to other issues that disproportionally impact women. For example, we recently worked on a minimally invasive breast cancer biopsy device. Our goal was not only to design an accurate medical tool but to consider the experiential needs of the female patient – something that is often ignored.

Consider user acceptance

You’ve established a user need and a great tech-driven solution, but will female consumers feel comfortable using it?

It’s important to consider whether women are culturally ready to adopt a tech-led solution, particularly if it involves intimate wearables or sensitive data.

For example, current technology is capable of analyzing menstrual flow, but are women willing to accept intimate electronics? Let’s remember that in some parts of the world, tampon usage is still taboo.

Baking the female experience into the design process will answer these questions early on.

Ditch the defaults

We’ve discussed reframing design to include females; however, the same principles apply to other areas of inclusivity, such as race, sexuality, disability, gender identity, and economics.

In FemTech, this means considering, for example, the male experience – a heterosexual couple trying for a baby may want the capability for the male to log into a fertility app as part of the shared experience.

Likewise, it means considering the affordability of a design for various socio-economic groups. An expensive pelvic floor trainer may be financially out of reach for many women, so is it possible to reduce costs with smarter manufacturing or a new business model?

Good design considers all perspectives. It’s time to ditch the defaults.

To continue the conversation, get in touch: womenshealth@cambridge-design.com

1 – The Global Femtech Market was valued at $19bn in 2019 and is expected to reach $60bn Billion by 2027, according to Emergen Research.
https://www.emergenresearch.com/industry-report/femtech-market
2 – https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/apple-stops-ignoring-womens-health-with-ios-9-healthkit-update-now-featuring-period-tracking/
3 – https://www.cityam.com/mrs-ms-steve-rowes-first-blunder/
4 – https://www.iso.org/committee/7647858/x/catalogue/p/0/u/1/w/0/d/0
5 – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53024123

What next for events in the world of COVID-19?

February 11th 2021

Ana Romero

Digital Marketer and Events Coordinator

The impact of the pandemic has dramatically shaken up the world of conferences and events. Ana Romero, Digital Marketer and Events Coordinator at Cambridge Design Partnership, looks back over a tumultuous year and asks, “what next”?

Here we are, almost exactly a year ago. This is Pharmapack, in Paris. The two-day event was attended by 5,500 delegates and more than 400 exhibitors, and just look at the optimism on our faces! We don’t know it yet, but this is the last physical event we’ll attend before the pandemic descends, forcing us into our spare rooms and at the mercy of Teams, Zoom, and an emerging world of digital-only events.

website_body-2_Pharmapack-2020-team-photo

CDP team at Pharmapack in Paris, February 2020. Left to right; Jon Powell, Senior Consultant, Ana Romero, Digital Marketer and Events Coordinator, Martha Hodgson, Market and Design Insights Research Consultant, and Uri Baruch, Partner and Head of Drug Delivery

Welcome to chaos

A month later, in March 2020, the events world was in chaos and turmoil. I was busy contacting the organizers of each event we were planning to attend, checking their websites for updates, following the news and, arranging refunds for cancelled conferences.

Many conference organizers simply announced that they would be cancelling their 2020 offering and would be back in 2021. But others tried to offer a virtual experience. The idea of going online came as a relief to us here at CDP – as we were just as keen as before to share our expertise, to network with our peers, and meet tomorrow’s clients.

However, the transition to digital has been challenging, especially for event organizers dramatically adapting their business model and event delivery in a matter of weeks.

Forget the plan; it’s time to adapt.

So what have we learned? The most immediate learning for us at CDP has been that a good virtual conference is made by enabling the sort of interactions which make a physical conference so valuable. Can you get talking with someone who is visiting the event, develop them into a contact and then, hopefully, a client?

The first virtual conference we attended didn’t work at all. We couldn’t network with other companies, to reach the people we wanted or to strike up any sort of rapport with other attendees. A low bar had been set.

However, in only a few months, I’ve seen many improvements in the different platforms used and some real successes so far. Several virtual conferences we’ve attended during the pandemic have offered far better ways to connect and market to delegates. For example, some platforms allowed us to see and filter the delegate list (by name, role, and company name) and to request a one-to-one meeting with that person. In addition, the ability to watch presentations on demand made it easier to book a video conference during a session slot and later go and watch what we missed, something that wouldn’t have been possible in a real-life event.

Virtual conferences have crystallized how important it is to have your material in a digital and interactive format. We’ve learned to have just enough collateral in the digital booth to initiate a conversation. In a virtual exhibition, it’s easier to visit a virtual booth and fill your virtual goodie bag with all of the marketing collateral with just a click. This also has the risk of someone (including competitors) downloading your collateral and leaving the booth without saying a word. While this wouldn’t normally happen in a physical event it’s not hugely problematic: our materials can be seen by anyone.

One downside is that international events may not be particularly international: if an event is taking place on UK time and you want people from around the globe to virtually attend, you’ll find it’s tricky to enable conversations between members that are located in the US or Asia, due to the time differences. We’ve noticed this effect in the events we’ve taken part in.

We don’t expect face-to-face events to return properly in 2021. While many events companies are talking a confident game that plans for face-to-face before the year is out, most are adding other options to their virtual offerings. Think here of webinars, roundtables, and other additions that tend to suggest the new world is becoming “baked in”.

The post-COVID future

With all this virtual activity and conferencing ability we might ask, will the world ever go back to face-to-face conferences?

My feeling is that the leap to digital is a permanent one, but that physical conferences are far from finished. There are some significant downsides to virtual interaction that cannot easily be overcome. The first is the nature of the experience itself. If you travel to a conference and attend for two or three days, you are committed. You have spent time and money to get there, and as a result, you give it all your attention and energy, which makes the whole process more immersive. By contrast, a digital conference that you attend from your office or your home will struggle to capture your focus in the same way. You are so much more likely to be reading emails, on the phone, or being interrupted by your kids.

The very fact that it is so effortless to attend a digital conference can make it a less valued experience. If you “bump into” a delegate virtually, by messaging them through the conference’s contact system, it is far easier for them to ignore you. However, if you meet them at a real-life event, your chances of striking up a fruitful conversation are far stronger. Perhaps this is a good thing, forcing us to be on top of our game, offering nothing but compelling content and conversations. Although the process of tracking down attendees at a virtual conference is now quite slick, there’s nothing quite like meeting someone face-to-face and all of the non-verbal communication that goes into those meetings. It’s much harder to entertain clients and to build up goodwill online.

website_body-2_Ben-Strutt-presents-at-GIF-Virtual

Ben Strutt, Partner and Head of Design and Front-end Innovation, speaking with Max Angelov from the CDP offices in Cambridge ahead of presenting at last year’s virtual Global Innovation Forum, November 2020.

A crucial part of why we here at CDP value the opportunities offered by real-life conferences is that they give us the chance to develop and share our thought leadership. The events themselves are part of our learning, and giving presentations or taking part in discussions help to raise our profile in our key markets. The fact that a virtual conference presentation will often remain online for several months extends our reach significantly. We can also access information which shows who has been watching and, where it’s relevant and data protection allows, we can reach out to them afterwards to continue the conversation. This is a definite advantage of virtual events.

But when it comes to displaying our physical work, we want to show off what we create and allow booth visitors to interact with a connected inhaler, an innovative food packaging concept or any other product development. It’s hard to replicate the tactile experience of a real-life display of products that can be picked up and examined and where a visitor can ask questions of the development team.

All of this suggests that we’re headed for a future of hybrid physical and digital events. There will be real-life events, but some digital tools, such as one-to-one video meetings, digital roundtables, and others currently being explored will stay. Physical and remote attendees will be offered far more connectivity and interaction with other attendees than ever before.

In the meantime, as we press through the pandemic and emerge on the other side, it’s crucial to be creative and make use of the technology that allows us to connect virtually. It’s fair to say that virtual events are not yet providing the full benefits of a real-life gathering. But we are where we are and it’s in all our interests to work with digital alternatives so that we can keep doing business, one way or another. Whether it’s physical or digital, I’ll see you there.

Innovating for context; The role of Anthropology in innovation

July 21st 2020

Jessica Platt

Market and Design Insights Researcher

Ben Strutt

Partner

Although we don’t often hear the term ‘anthropology’ referenced in the innovation process, anyone charged with this objective knows implicitly that the key focus areas of language, culture, society and place, are critical when it comes to the harmonisation of a brand or the successful launch of a new global product.

The growing adoption of user-led approaches to front end innovation (FEI) means that global new product development teams are highly motivated to understand the cultural background of their target user’s social, functional and emotional needs. Anthropological thinking has a lot to offer new product innovation by providing a range of tools that help shift perspectives, making the strange appear familiar, or re-defining an experience to make the familiar even more intuitive, more relevant, more personalised…or perhaps more provocative. Our collective goal as innovators is to create products and services that will resonate within different cultures, deliver meaningful value, and improve lives. Anthropology offers an analytical lens for insights that reach beyond what people say, to access the culturally influenced assumptions that underpin their decisions and behaviour. This allows us to create products and experiences that resonate with our users lived experience.

Anthropology and ethnography

Anthropology is the in-depth understanding of people and place and is implicit to much of our FEI work at Cambridge Design Partnership because the history of Anthropology is closely intertwined with ethnography. At CDP, we use lean derivatives of ethnography to support our client’s fast-paced innovation initiatives and to keep them user-focused. With the growing pressure for innovation teams to be ‘agile’ and ‘lean’, we continually develop even faster contextual insight methods that engage real people in exploratory research, and co-creative activity. As the world changes, we rise to new challenges by adapting many of our ethnographic research methods to utilise digital techniques and ensure that we can continue to successfully access the deepest insights from people based around the world, no matter the global context. This is more important than ever in a ‘new normal’, where social distancing policy is now restricting routine daily physical interactions.

Ethnography in innovation

Whether it is conducted in person or online, ethnography is all about empathy; it is an opportunity for us to put ourselves in the shoes of our consumers, to understand what resonates with them and validate what is meaningful. This is essential to develop a unique and believable product specification and strategy. Ethnography is particularly powerful when used in combination with other analytical overlays. Anthropological thinking pushes ethnographic research beyond immediate context to access other subconscious influences behind key decisions.

Incorporating anthropology in ethnographic research creates an opportunity to interpret how deep-seated cultural nuances might also be impacting on what consumers aren’t saying explicitly in a research scenario! This is a crucial level of understanding when creating a globally relevant product that can be seamlessly incorporated into daily activities. When we run research remotely, applying an anthropological lens to our discussion guides and being creative about the way we ask people to share their lived experiences with us becomes even more important, because we are often limited in how much behaviour we can see. Our questions must therefore be clear and targeted to reach a depth of understanding from a distance!

Learning to ‘read’ culture

Understanding the culture of our target users is crucial for success because culture changes the way that people understand their experiences. For example, the user experience provided by McDonald’s in all restaurants around the world are virtually identical (economists famously use the Big Mac as a global measure of price index), but culture alters the experience that diners have. Whereas in the UK fast food has a mixed reputation for trading off quality for convenience, in some regions of South Asia, McDonald’s signifies high status and is frequented by the wealthy middle classes. The sacred status of a cow in India, brings yet another pivotal McDonalds perspective. McDonald’s may look the same, but the experience it provides is transformed by the cultural context.

Logos, brand-marks, and tag lines are assumed to carry a universal meaning, but context can change the way that they are understood. Semiotics and the cultural psychology of colour can also be effectively combined with ethnography to investigate the signs and visual cues that influence people’s understanding of the world they inhabit, which may be missed by a research team not attuned to these themes.

Often it is only through immersing yourself in another culture that these different systems of understanding become clear. For example, although it is common practice to eat with one’s hands in Sri Lanka, it is considered extremely rude to lick your fingers at the end of a meal. I only learned this crucial etiquette when I flagrantly broke the ‘rules’ at a dinner with some Sri Lankan colleagues.

My embarrassing mistake caused the people I was eating with to explain a rule that was usually unstated. As I walked down Galle Road that evening, I passed an advert for KFC:

KFC
It’s finger lickin’ good.

I have seen the same sign thousands of times but that evening the tag line took on a completely new significance. In a country where eating with one’s hands is the norm, but it is taboo to lick your fingers, does KFC actually offer a different brand identity? Is the tag line transformed from being nostalgic to become a bit maverick… a bit saucy?

In this case, the contextual overtones of the tag line don’t appear to have negatively impacted KFC, but there are many examples where subtle (or not so subtle) cultural readings or mistranslations have presented brands with uncomfortable challenges to un-pick, which could have been proactively predicted had a cultural research lens been applied earlier in the process.

Anthropology offers a raft of effective desk and field research tools to access the things that go unsaid within cultures which, once articulated, reveal important insights that can radically redirect and refine a product specification or a global brand strategy.

For breakthrough innovation to take place, it is essential that a new product, service or brand proposition resonates with the audience. This means not just looking beyond what people say, but adding an anthropology lens to understand the non-verbal, semiotic and sensorial cues, to reach the foundation of the very assumptions that influence their daily decisions, and which remain largely unspoken.

COVID-19 quarantine – How we are keeping our innovation projects moving

March 13th 2020

Jez Clements

Partner

Mike Cane

Partner

Mitigating infection means more and more people are working away from the office. At Cambridge Design Partnership we have geared up to work remotely, both internally with our project teams and externally with our customers. In this special blog, Jez shares some of the communication approaches we are using.

Here at Cambridge Design Partnership, we have a wealth of experience in remote working and conferencing. Our move to create the best possible virtual comms was initially sparked by our clients all over the world, with whom we seek to work closely in a collaborative and creative atmosphere from our HQ in Cambridge, UK and our East Coast engineering hub in Raleigh, North Carolina in the US.

We were mindful of the findings of Professor Albert Mehrabian, who back in the 1970s first mooted the concept of non-verbal communication. He found that in a test where people were asked to convey their feelings, 7% of communication was conveyed by the speaker’s words, 38% by their tone of voice and 55% by their body language.

In a vibrant meeting atmosphere like a brainstorm or creative discussion we naturally prefer the face to face experience, we find we talk a lot with our hands, technical props or mocks ups. So the trusty teleconference is lacking. Low cost video conferencing has been around for a while, but we have found that with a careful choice of hardware, software and etiquette, it’s a game changing tool.

The basics

We need teams to feel as though multiple locations have merged together, with everyone feeling relaxed and engaged so that they can fully contribute to the discussion. It’s crucial that everyone can see and hear each another, as well as look at what’s being presented or created, such as sketches, models, prototypes, videos and other simulations.

Choose the right platform

We use the Zoom videoconference platform; it integrates with Office and is easy to use. We simply email a link to join a meeting and with one click, the participant is in. Having said that we can easily add a password if needed.

But the software is only part of the equation, the camera and audio on many laptops leave much to be desired, and there are lots of relatively low cost add-ons that make all the difference.

Get plenty of cameras

You need high-definition video so participants can clearly see each other’s facial expressions and body language. This is surprisingly important – remember Professor Mehrabian’s findings! We use the Logitech range of high definition video conferencing cameras. We use ‘Connect’ for personal use and ‘Meet Up’ in larger conference rooms, they plug into your laptop and are transformational. They can be placed in your room to give a feeling of space, so the camera is not looking up your nose like many laptops do and the images are much more lifelike and expressive.

For groups you need enough cameras and screens for all team members to see and be seen. This makes everyone feel connected, rather than just having one camera focused on a whiteboard or a ‘talking head’. We link these cameras and screens into the meeting using the Zoom platform.

Clear audio

Having clear audio is essential, especially in larger rooms when people move about. Meet up offers great audio, but those who have to use laptops on their own need headsets or a Jabra table-top speaker/microphone, they are omni-directional and work really well with groups in larger rooms. It’s so important not to have to strain to make out what is being said, it makes the meeting much more relaxed and natural.

The role of the smart phone

Another key tool is the humble smartphone. This provides the flexibility for individual members to communicate very quickly. For instance, if there is a sketch or prototype someone wants to show, they can grab their smartphone, activate the Zoom app (use the joining code) and immediately share their camera. Of course, people can also join the meeting just with a smartphone.

Preparation is key

We always set up our meeting rooms in advance. No matter how good your kit is, there is often a technology ‘moment’ that needs resolution. You don’t want to lose that creative vibe as your team waits for IT issues. Also, don’t forget the conventional best practices for meetings apply as normal. Make sure you have a facilitator who issues briefing documents well ahead of the meeting and takes charge of the session with a clear plan.

Reap the benefits

With many virtual meetings and brainstorming sessions now under our belt, we’ve found that the remote working technology can actually enhance the communication experience. For instance, instead of all huddling around the same whiteboard or drawing, our use of smartphone cameras means that a drawing or virtual model can immediately be shared with everyone, regardless of their location. We have also found that a virtual meeting is usually much easier and quicker to organize, with more chance of all key players being able to attend and less time wasted while we wait for everyone to be available. It’s also hugely helpful that sessions can be easily recorded. This can be useful in unpicking exactly what was said and decided during a session.

Also, it’s remarkable to see how we are able to screen-share in our virtual meetings and work on complex Computer Aided Design (CAD), zooming in and highlighting areas, with the whole meeting able to follow and contribute.

In conclusion…

Now that we are used to virtual meetings, here at CDP we feel comfortable and confident with the technologies involved. It’s remarkable how people who are hundreds or even thousands of miles apart can work together really effectively, if the technology infrastructure is set up correctly.

The current outbreak of corona virus is worrying on every level, to which there are not many easy answers. However, there is a lot that we can do to ensure our economic activity is not hit too hard by the situation. We are happy to advise our clients how to make our virtual communication as effective as possible, and keep our innovation projects moving.

Will Google sequence your genome for free?

March 12th 2020

Richard Owen

Senior Consultant Bio-scientist

Recent advances in reducing the cost of DNA sequencing are beginning to offer the possibility of healthcare services in affluent countries sequencing the full genome of all their citizens. This has the potential of delivering huge benefits in the early detection and management of many diseases and consequently will profoundly improve clinical practice. However, the necessary balance between available cash, suitable technical resources and access to personal data are acting as a significant block to the genome’s potential.

The first human genomes were sequenced by the Human Genome Project and took 13 years, cost $2.7 billion and involved 20 of the world’s leading laboratories [1]. Since then there has been spectacular improvements in the speed and cost of genome sequencing, so much so that the advances made significantly outstrip the well-known Moore’s law improvements made in the computer chip industry [2, 3]. As an example of this progress, Veritas Genetics are currently offering a whole genome sequencing service direct to the consumer for less than £500 [4]. It is highly likely that, in a few years’ time, with further advances in technology and the inevitable scaling efficiencies involved when testing at a national level that the cost per sequenced genome could drop to around £50.

At this price point, the costs involved in a nation-wide genome sequencing program do not seem unreasonable. To sequence every child born in the UK (731,000 per year or 2,000 per day) would cost £37m which is a mere 0.03% of NHS England’s 2018 budget [5, 6]. Their genome will not change over time and if sequenced at birth its information can be made use of throughout their life and hence deliver maximum benefit. Even sequencing the entire population would be equivalent to just 3% of the budget for 2018 [6]. The apparent attainability of this is reinforced when considering that the UK government spent over £300m on the 100,000 genome project and plans to turn the NHS into “the first mainstream health service in the world to offer genomic medicine as part of routine care” [7]. Access to such a phenomenal genetic resource paired with the demographic and health records held on each person by the NHS would allow academics and clinicians to fast track research and identify the sequences that allow early and corrective management of many of today’s crippling chronic diseases.

So, while the above might suggest this is an obvious project for governments to invest in, there are very good reasons why they might be hesitant to do so. Firstly, we do not know how to make use of the vast majority of the data that will be collected – we are in a position where we can read people’s genomes at a relatively low cost but struggle to understand and make full use of the information contained and this may well take many years to change. Secondly two very significant sets of infrastructures have to be established. The first is a national facility capable of sequencing 2,000 genomes a day, the second is a data storage and analysis capability that can handle the astonishing amount of data that will be created by such a system. One way to visualize the amount of data is that the 750,000 genomes collected each and every year would require a stack of standard 4 gigabyte DVDs about 1.5 miles high [8]. Indeed, the data storage and processing required for large scale genomic analysis is seen by some as the biggest of the sources of so-called Big Data and possibly its most challenging aspect [9]. The UK Government has a poor record in both large infrastructure projects and in IT projects, so they are unlikely to make the decision to invest until they know exactly how the data would be utilized and that the required infrastructures are de-risked.

So, while the UK government (and others) might view this as a risky and unjustifiable investment before we really know how to make use of even a fraction of the information it is very possible that some companies might see it as an attractive investment opportunity. It is well known that some of the large IT companies (Apple, Amazon and Microsoft) not only are much closer to having the capabilities to handle the vast amounts of cloud-based data that would result from universal sequencing but also have made significant investments in healthcare opportunities. Google Ventures would be seen as a front runner as they have already invested $1.5bn in healthcare including 23andMe (one of the leading direct-to-consumer sequencing companies) and are “especially interested in companies at the intersection of health and information technology” [10]. Google has already partnered with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and is providing its cloud services with a toolkit developed by the institute that can be used to analyze the data [8].

However, while Google and the others seem the obvious resource to carry out this task there are huge implications in profit-seeking companies holding personal data that could be used to predict what diseases, life styles, behaviors and preferences they may have – theoretically allowing the ultimate targeting of advertising and insurance provision. Currently personal data is protected by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the US’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) but these would have to be significantly updated to prevent the highly profitable abuse of data that could happen.

If neither government nor private companies can be trusted to carry this out, are we destined to miss out on the benefits of the secrets that our genomes hold? Possibly not if the obvious solution of a partnership between government and the big IT companies can be set up with the appropriate business model and data protection. A private company could relatively easily set up the two necessary infrastructures of sequencing capability and cloud analytics and I certainly wouldn’t bet against Google either scaling up 23andme or else purchasing one of the major sequencing companies to do this. They could then run the sequencing service for all UK newborns for free and hold their sequences. These sequences would be linked to codes that prevented the company identifying the person involved but the government would hold a master list that linked codes to identities (this is very similar to how clinical trials are run where a private company holds data linked to a reference code but only the hospital can link a reference code to an identity).

As ongoing clinical research discovers new genetic biomarkers the private company could then charge on a “pay per view” basis each time data is accessed by GPs or hospitals. From the payer’s viewpoint it would allow access to the data not only when the information has been researched sufficiently so that it can be made use of but also at the moment it is actually clinically needed.

Academic researchers could hugely accelerate the rate of discovery of new biomarkers by data mining within the stored genomes. They could link genomes to identities and their NHS records (using the master codes), follow them over time and discover the relevance and utility of further DNA sequences. The ability of the private company to do similar data mining would be severely restricted by the lack of access to any health data.

This would appear to be a win/win/win situation; governments do not have to spend money on risky programs before there is any utility in doing so, patients will receive personal and predictive clinical therapy and companies will be able to make profitable returns on investments in areas that they are experts in. Indeed, it could be argued that without this sort of bold public/commercial initiative it will be many years before we start to make real use of genomic data in routine clinical practice.

It would be interesting to canvas opinion on this, let me know of your thoughts.

Richard Owen

Senior Healthcare Innovation Consultant
Connect on LinkedIn

References

[1] UK National Human Genome Research Institute report. Available at https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project/Completion-FAQ
[2] G.E. Moore. Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits, Electronics, 114–117, April 1965 https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html
[3] https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequencing-Costs-Data
[4] https://www.veritasgenetics.com/
[5] Overview of the UK population: August 2019; Office for National Statistics. Available at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/august2019
[6] https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/
[7] Wellcome Trust press release 2016. Available at https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/prime-minister-opens-%C2%A342m-biodata-innovation-centre-and-new-sequencing-facility
[8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/07/07/sequencing-the-genome-creates-so-much-data-we-dont-know-what-to-do-with-it/
[9] Stephens et al. PLOS Biology 2015. DOI:10.1371 10 https://www.gv.com/portfolio/

The 2020s decade and the changing climate in innovation

January 17th 2020

Mike Cane

Partner

Matt Morris

Senior consultant mechanical engineer

George Bostock

Senior consultant mechanical engineer

It’s the start of both a new year and new decade. At this time, it’s traditional to try to predict the emerging challenges, innovation opportunities and technologies that will shape our work at CDP for the next ten years.

As I was thinking about writing this blog over the holiday break, I could not avoid remembering last year’s mass climate protests and in particular, Greta Thunberg’s extraordinary speech to UN leaders last September. Over just the last week we have watched the reports of extreme forest fires in Australia caused by unusually warm sea conditions, Norway reporting its hottest ever temperature in January and Moscow importing artificial snow for New Year celebrations. In the UK, the Met Office published an analysis of our weather over the last century that shows the last decade had the highest winter and summer temperatures ever recorded.

I am sure the implications of climate change will impact every family and business significantly in the ’20s but it’s such an incredibly big and multifaceted subject it’s hard to comprehend; so I wondered what the day to day impact might be on an average family.

Reducing the CO2 emissions from our energy consumption will be one of the main targets for the ‘20s. For most of us, it is spread between domestic uses, food, transport and the energy needed to manufacture and supply the consumer products we buy, use and throw away.

As an individual consumer it’s very difficult to find out how big an environmental impact we make, what to do first and where the biggest opportunities for savings lie. This information is available, but it’s fragmented and difficult to interpret. There are many competing rationales for change that are all too often in tension with one another. Should consumers be rejecting plastic food packaging that extends shelf life? Should local councils be looking to bury rather than incinerate low-grade plastics with no recycling value at end-of-life? These choices only get more complex when groups, governments and ultimately consumers (albeit indirectly) try to consider all the UN’s 17 sustainability development goals globally.

Assuming we can work through this complexity, any major change in society faces resistance, it’s simply human instinct to be wary. The Ross-Kubler model describes the emotional responses to major changes in our lives, the initial shock and denial we experience before curiosity, enthusiasm and commitment to a new solution kick in. So reliable, understandable information on the implications of our choices is the key to get us all to commit to change the way we live.

Reducing energy use in our homes will be a major challenge. In the UK our electricity supply from renewables exceeded that from fossil fuels for the first time in the third quarter of 2019, but gas and oil remain the largest domestic energy sources. It is clear in the next decade we will become more focused on insulation, exploiting local renewable energy sources and smart energy management. The technology we have today can create carbon neutral homes, but at a cost that is not always worthwhile on a personal level with today’s economics, principally because energy is relatively cheap. So, we will need a switch from the short-term economic logic to seeking benefits over longer time horizons, perhaps those measured in human generations.

As is common in the UK, most household’s transport needs are dominated by car usage. At CDP the number of electric vehicles in our car park is rising because these can be fuelled from renewable electricity, if available. However, the embodied energy in electric vehicles is higher than you might expect, and their longevity is yet to become the important issue it should be to maximise their effectiveness. Manufacturers make their profit when they sell a new car, but if they were responsible for the total energy used in manufacture, operation and recycling they might follow a different design strategy and business model. A move from selling products to providing integrated services is an approach that could facilitate a more logical strategy for emissions reduction across many markets.

In any case we are destined to travel less in the next decade, by necessity living closer to our work and relying more on low power technologies to communicate. One of my colleagues recently wrote a blog on how we are doing this at CDP; A practical approach to multinational innovation.

Finally, in the ‘20s we need to leave behind our unconstrained consumption of food and new things. The embodied energy, and natural resources in the products we buy is the hidden part of the iceberg. For example, the energy needed to manufacture a smart phone is many times the energy it will ever use during its life. This change means products that are designed to be upgraded and avoid technology obsolescence will become more highly valued. I think functional simplicity, reliability and effectiveness will become increasingly important, we will ask ourselves what we really need, and choose products that just meet that with elegance and style.

However, it’s an obvious statement that the biggest barrier to more sustainable energy use and reducing CO2 emissions will be the cost of doing so. Ironically, consuming less will cost more because of the investment needed in new infrastructure and business structures, so we are likely as a society to resist this change. While the wealthiest will be able to afford this challenge, the poorest will experience the highest impact and this will have a severe political impact on western democracies. Groups will say it’s not fair that I should change before others do. You can see this happening now at local, national and international levels already. Perhaps that is why Greta has had such a cultural impact at the UN in this debate, because children have the least invested in our institutions and the status quo, but the most to lose from the likely effects of global warming.

At CDP we have brought together a team of experts to help our clients navigate the challenges of creating sustainable strategies, new products and services in the next decade. If you would like to discuss the opportunities for innovation in this area, please call Matt Morris or George Bostock.