Ms Simona Rocchi, Senior Director, Design for Sustainability Studies – Advanced & Emerging Markets, Philips Design,
Ms Simona Rocchi
Encouraged by the success of its co-creation project in India, Low Smoke Chulha, Philips is now partnering with NGOs, and local community here to co-create solutions to fight malnutrition. The Philips Design Community has come up with Trunky and Monkey, a strap for healthcare workers and parents to precisely measure the mid-upper arm circumference to know the nutritional status of children.
Currently Philips is in a co-creation phase, asking NGOs, social designers and other relevant stakeholder to comment on its initial concepts. These co-creation projects are a part of Philips’ Philanthropy by Design initiative.
In this exclusive interview, Ms Simona Rocchi, Senior Director, Design for Sustainability Studies – Advanced & Emerging Markets, Philips Design, shares her thoughts on co-creation, use of social media, and the relationship between sustainability and co-creation.
Simona is responsible at Philips Design for managing the global creative direction of various sustainability-based initiatives in product/system innovation and strategic design. Excerpts from her interview:
Rural Partnership for Health Indoor Cooking: The Philips Way Younomy: Many product configuration ideas are touted as examples of co-creation. But the Low-Smoke Chulha story has all the ingredients of a perfect co-creation story. To begin with, you did not come to the market with pre-configured components. You simply shared your skills, organizing abilities, and partnered with end users to collect their ideas and co-designed a stove. However, why it has to be labelled as "philanthropy by design" and not a business?
Simona Rocchi: Ihave to give the background. We launched the Philanthropy by Design initiative primarily to motivate our employees to create products for the low-income population or the bottom of the pyramid group, as you say. Though we are not looking it as a business venture or financial return on investments, we believe that as an organization, we are gaining new insights about our future customers, future suppliers, and future markets. Our employees are motivated. They find engaging in a different context and working with different people very inspiring. There is increased brand reputation too.
And, we believe that we need to take a collaborative approach to address more complex social challenges. Our starting point is to design tools that would empower people who belong to the low-income group. Younomy:How does the current scenario look like? How many users are there for your low smoke chulha? How many entrepreneurs are engaged in production? How and where the product is sold, and marketed in India (and abroad)?
Simona Rocchi:It is an open innovation program. Meaning, we share the design concepts, prototypes, specifications and our user insights with others. Anyone can download the kit from www.lowsmokechulha.com and start making the stove.
Last year, approximately 500 stoves have been sold by the network of local entrepreneurs and NGOs. Now, we have partnered with an NGO to take the model to other parts of rural India by giving free training to entrepreneurs to produce low-smoke stoves, and create awareness among users.
In fact, we have found a new market for the stoves in East Africa. With minor modifications, Chulhas designed for Indian rural households, prove to be appealing to rural East African homes, which have similar cooking habits, socio-cultural settings and economic background.
Younomy: Recently, you have launched the Trunky and Monkey project. Can you give us more details?
Simona Rocchi: We are now designing tools that would help healthcare workers and families to be better informed and better equipped to monitor malnutrition. Malnutrition is not considered as a health issue in rural India, because malnutrition is not always visible because it is so prevalent. Our team has designed the ’Trunky and Monkey’ a strap to measure the mid-upper arm circumference, which is an immediate indicator of whether a child is malnourished or not. The straps are designed to appeal to children, creating something playful and non-medical looking to encourage children to co-operate in having their arm circumference measured. Even parents can use them to check their children. ‘Trunky and Monkey’ -intended for the healthcare worker toolbox – is the first concept selected for further development and field trials this year.
Younomy:What do you think is necessary for a business to be successful in co-creation? What are the managerial-readiness or organizational-readiness factors?
Simona Rocchi:It is not about co-creating or co-designing just a single product, but the whole proposition. We need to co-design partnerships, and networks for distribution. Companies have to be willing to partner and work with grass roots level organizations, NGOs, individuals, and other stakeholders to make the proposition a win-win to all. Younomy:How does Philips make innovation or product development social? Can you also tell how do social media figure in the process? Simona Rocchi: We undertake traditional market research, but the emphasis is on people research. Our innovations are people centric – we take anthropological and social approach to understand people’s needs. Recently we used social media as a research tool for understanding people’s requirements. The project, Menu Menu, launched in Spain, gave us invaluable understanding of the latent needs of food consumers. It made it much easier for us to observe the latent needs that people had, that may not have been expressed in a more traditional research exercise.
We identified different types of relationships people have with food and its environment: spaces, tools, ingredients, celebrations, football games, movies, family presentations, breakfast on Sunday and sofort. Even for the Trunky and Monkey project, we have come up with a website www.philanthropybydesign.org/fightmalnutrition/ to further co-create the initial concepts.
Younomy: How do you ensure that the sustainability is considered and factored in when you come up with a new product? Do you use some frameworks or guidelines?
Simona Rocchi: Our group vision is to make the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation. Our business goal is to improve the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2025. To realise our sustainability aspirations, we have sustainability targets for every year to minimise our ecological footprint.
We have identified six green focal areas: energy efficiency, packaging, hazardous substances, weight, recycling and disposal, and lifetime reliability. When we design new products, we incorporate these guiding principles. There is a business case in eco-design when we look at the bigger picture..
Younomy: By the very nature of diversity in participation (from customers to local community), value co-creation with society is likely to advance the interests of sustainable design. How does co-creation contribute to sustainable design?
Simona Rocchi: Co-Co-creation is an intricate part of sustainable design. In the past, design used to be very much an individual action. We design in isolation, think about shapes, functions, and so on. But today the market is very complex and challenging. And the design process has to be about collective thinking.
The value creation process is democratized. We have to take into account the needs of all stakeholders, when creating a product, and naturally, sustainability is one of the biggest needs of companies as well as society.