Case Study

Essilor of America: how might we innovate to meet our customers’ needs?

Challenge

This project was to support the research and development at Essilor of America, a global lenses maker. The need was the creation of innovative solutions that would support their customers’ needs. They recently launched products that never reached the expected success metrics set by management.

The team at Essilor needed support through the whole service design scope: empathy, user interviews, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

My key role

I directly worked with the R&D Director and brought my skills in Service Design, workshops facilitation, user interviews, and prototyping/testing.

Design Thinking 101

The cross-functional Innovation Lab team knew Design Thinking could help, but had no experience in the field. They had never interviewed customers to learn more about their goals, needs, and intrinsic motivations. Nor had they ever held structured ideation and prototyping sessions that resulted in real-time customer feedback.

Customer first

The team also wanted to make Design Thinking a repeatable process throughout Essilor. They all agreed that there was a huge benefit to the bottom-line if products and services were designed starting with the customer first. Thus, it was also important to show that Design Thinking methods and tools can uncover some real insights that solve concrete business challenges. They needed management buy-in.

Breakthrough collaboration

In our 5-month collaboration, I designed and facilitated several weeks of in-person workshops that adapted the Design Thinking methodology and tools to the challenges facing the Essilor Innovation Lab team. Whenever the team was working the field on their own, I supplemented the in-person workshops with weekly check-in conference calls.

Design Thinking adoption

Essilor’s initial goal was to use Design Thinking as a method to generate more ideas for their R&D innovation pipeline. An additional, secondary, goal was to adapt the methodology and tools for a repeatable process of innovation throughout the organization. Throughout our time together, the Innovation Lab team learned how to prototype, and test ideas and concepts in just a few days. They made progress much faster, without the cost and time of actually building and producing a full product or service, before validating the need for it. A few months after the workshops, the Innovation Lab team continued to rapidly prototype and test a dozen more ideas that were sketched and storyboarded during the ideation sessions. The insights discovered and shared with upper management had a big impact on the the future pipeline of the R&D department. What’s more, the marketing department got more ideas on how to improve messaging and sales saw new ways of adding to the bottom line. The success of the Design Thinking sprint also showed management that using real user feedback to improve products & services works.

Testimonial

Featured

It completely changed the way we think about innovation

“Max is a phenomenal facilitator with an infectious enthusiasm for designing products and services around existing human needs. They're a holistic thinker who will help you search for improvement opportunities or blue-sky innovations - whether it be internal processes or external products/services - within your company.
We brought them in to guide our U.S. Innovation Lab through a design thinking sprint with the aim of generating product/service ideas for R&D. At the outset, Max dove right into understanding our organizational goals, helping us zero in on the scope to be explored in this sprint. They designed informative and fun workshops that taught us empathy-based research methods and data synthesis, as well as led us through several days of ideation using human-centered co-design workshops.
Max expertly guided our team through the rapid prototyping and testing phases where we were able to gather valuable insights for the company. Attending their workshops completely changed the way we think about innovation within the organization. One of our goals was to make design thinking a repeatable process across the company. Max taught us the methods and tools of design thinking and helped us get management buy-in.
Throughout their time with us, everyone got inspired with practical tools for working on any challenges using design thinking framework and tools.”

Elodie Camaret, Director of Consumer Innovation, R&D Essilor of America