Episode 7: Innovate with Jeneanne Rae from Motiv Strategies
August 07, 201437:32

Episode 7: Innovate with Jeneanne Rae from Motiv Strategies

Jeneanne Rae is an internationally recognized thought leader and expert in innovation management, design strategy, and customer experience. She has served as a consultant and teacher to dozens of leading organizations during her twenty-year career, including Procter & Gamble, Under Armour, Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente, Johnson & Johnson, AARP, HP, and AIG.

In addition to penning articles for top industry publications such as the Design Management Review, Innovation Management and Fast Company, Rae has written extensively for Bloomberg BusinessWeek and was named one of its “Magnificent Seven Gurus of Innovation” in its cover story on the creative corporation. She was later hailed one of BusinessWeek’s “Leaders of the Year,” for her groundbreaking work in the study of service innovation.

Prior to forming Motiv, Rae spent seven years on the executive team design powerhouse IDEO and was President of management consulting firm, Peer Insight, for six years. She has serviced as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business for 10 years and has taught executive education through a number of top-ranked programs.

Jeneanne holds a B.S. in marketing and finance from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

00:20 Jeneanne graduated from Harvard Business school in 1989 and founded Motiv Strategies three years ago.

00:50 Jeneanne loves helping people, creating and inspiring new solutions, and helping large companies do right by their customers.

1:15 “Accelerate the Possible”–Motiv Strategies’ tagline is about accelerating innovation to visualize possible futures.

2:40 Jeneanne worked for IDEO, studied service innovation and became an expert in that.  Jeneanne believes that “choosing to be an expert” in a certain area will give you a leg up versus knowing a little about a lot.

4:20 The risks of being an entrepreneur. Jeneanne does not think of herself as a consultant first and an entrepreneur second.

5:40 What is ‘Service Innovation’?

6:12 “Services are inherently intangible”: they are harder to capture the essence of, but with building understanding and techniques, more firms are beginning to specialize in this type of thing.

7:10 In today’s world, you see much more growth in product services and building solutions than in the product-specific market.

7:30 An example of service innovation or service design in the context of healthcare world.

8:45 The beginning of innovation starts with observing people.

9:50 Technology works in basic ways, but the difficulty is designing something that is so compelling that people want to use the product and find it very useful.

10:45 Service innovation is all about the customer service. Three things: Drive loyal customers, Reduce the turn of customers, and increase referrals.

11:40 By studying customers, you can find ways to serve them better, faster, and cheaper.

12:10 Part of the success of having a business is not the product alone, but the customer experience as well.

13:20 What are the signs that service innovation is needed in a business?

13:50 “NPS”: Net Promoter Score—businesses use this one tool, but it doesn’t tell businesses where their customer service experience might be broken.

14:15 Many companies do not understand how to find something that’s wrong and fix it. The idea of service innovation is not wide-spread yet, even within large service organizations like healthcare providers. This is a problem for companies attempting to grow their own business and fix issues that they may have.

15:10 Organizations that spend some time training employees in service innovation will have a competitive advantage in their respective markets.

16:40 What is “Touch Point Mapping”? It is the backbone of customer experience service design.

17:20 “Moments of Truth” of customer experience really reveal a company’s success or failure in customer service.

18:30 The Patient Clinical Journey vs. the “Other Patient Journey”

20:20 “One user experience does not fit all.” It’s important to put together a map of who the customers you want to study are. When you are designing an experience for your customers, you want to design an experience for the ends of the bell-curve, not the middle of the bell-curve, as most companies would expect and do.

21:20 Service innovation is not only the functional customer experience, but also the emotional customer experience.

22:10 Sometimes improving customer experience means changing the culture of an organization.

23:00 Jeneanne recently did a study on customer design that showed that over a period of 10 years, companies that invested in building design capabilities had a 228% return over the same period of time.

24: 05 Companies that invest in “Right-brain skills” have shown that they can out-perform year after year.

25:03 “Strategy is more imagination than it is analytics.”

26:07 Jeneanne writes blogs for HBR.org to help their audience understand design management more.

27:12 Often, when companies call in Motiv Strategies, they don’t have the insights they need to get an edge. What really needs to be understood is how people operate.

28:00 “You can’t design for a mass-market, you have to design for people.”

28:50 Outside-In service organization vs. Inside-Out service organization.

30:00 The difficulty with home health equipment. How do we make home health equipment accessible and reduce opportunity costs?

31: 40 Jeneanne is giving a talk on the value of design to business at the opening of the Design Museum of Boston, as well as a talk in Austin, and continuing her blogging for HBR. A book on design management and service innovation may be in the foreseeable future as well.

33:00 Check out http://motivstrategies.com/ or e-mail Jeneanne@MotivStrategies.com to set up a speaking engagement with Jeneanne.

Follow Motiv Strategies on Twitter: @motivstrategies

Follow Jeneanne Rae on Twitter: @JeneanneMRae

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