I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a colleague of mine, Tine Park, who’s just returned from facilitating a workshop on hospital innovation in Chicago at EPIC 2009, an international conference on the application of ethnography and human-centred design in industry.

At Designit, we’ve been working at a Danish hospital with service innovation for a year now. And Designit’s EPIC workshop indicated that one challenge is universal for hospitals: humanising healthcare.

Participants of the workshop – among others healthcare professionals and decision-makers from the public and private healthcare sector in the U.S. – said there was a need to: 1) improve communication between staff and patients so that that patient’s understand their situation and role, 2) make people feel welcome and safe 3) meet the needs of users as individuals.

In other words, they expressed a need for increased focus on the person. The individual. Ensuring the system fits the user – and not the other way round. Create real solutions for real people – that is also the need identified at the workshop and most certainly by our fieldwork in at Odense University Hospital in Denmark.

So how do you do this? Well, it’s important to say that this doesn’t have to cost the earth. As an innovator / design thinker, you need to show respect for the complexity of hospitals and the constraints. You must accept hospitals’ evidence-based culture – then identify what to test and create the right test change conditions. Many small, incremental innovations can, when gathered, have a big impact. It’s not about changing everything overnight, but slowly starting a new mindset and a movement.

Another crucial point is commitment. As a decision-maker at a hospital, you need to ask yourself: are you really committed to this change process? Will you support it throughout the organisation – even when you meet opposition?

Interesting to see that the need for humanisation in the healthcare sector is more widespread than we’d thought. Hospitals are most definitely not immune to change, you just need to understand the dynamics and design your innovation process accordingly.

Just some thoughts from the field…

The Minister of Trade and Industry in Norway, Sylvia Brustad, recently announced design as one of her focus areas and grants the Norwegian Design Council 10 million NOK to initiate a design driven innovation program.

Even though it is not much, it is a very important sign in Norwegian politics. The politicians might finally have realized something our Nordic neighbours realized years ago. Design is about creating value and not just about styling…

Later this fall, the government will publish a white paper on innovation. In the government’s plan for innovation made in 2003 – design was hardly mentioned. And this was the same year as the Korean government launched their very own five year design strategy to increase the country’s GDP – with great success!

So here we are almost six years later with multinational companies around the world using design as a strategy in sharpening their competitive edge… Have Norwegian politicians finally gotten the point? And will they succeed in forwarding this message to business and industry? When Sylvia Brustad says she believes in design as an innovation driver – does she really mean it?

In an interview, Sylvia Brustad mentions products like the Tripp Trapp chair and Cherrox boot as good examples of design innovations in Norway. These are almost 40 year old products that represent the “old way” of thinking design. Sylvia Brustad needs new examples of design innovations! She needs examples that show the potential in design TODAY – e.g. service innovations that examplify design being used in developing immaterial values – in creating user experiences.

And as she needs new examples – Norwegian designers need the support in creating them. Use the 10 million for this! The Norwegian Design Council should initiate service design projects in our growing service sector just like the Danish government has done. This can improve our services and our design industry – they both need support in evolving….

I believe that the big potential for innovations are not in the Norwegian industry – it’s in the services!

Put that in the white paper on innovation!