It will be interesting to see how the announced “Do Tank” eventually turns out…

The U.K. Design Council set up the “Red” initiative to tackle social and economic issues through design-led innovation. They run a “Do Tank” to create prototypes of new ideas for government services quickly. (It is designed deliberately to contrast with “Think Tanks” typically populated by paper-writing policy wonks.) Van Der Hoeven liked the idea and decided to take immediate action. Following the lecture she put her staff to work to create a pilot to run a similar “Do Tank” in the Netherlands.

Read the full BusinessWeek article called “The Netherlands’ Drive to Build a Service Economy” .

Jeneanne also refers to Innovation is Served at the end of her article. The Dutch version has been downloaded over >850 times from our website. And recently the ministry of Economic Affairs has also published an official English translation of the book which has already been very well received.

There seems to be a clear need for these kind of service design publications. Both from designers wanting to get into the field and business people who want to understand how they can utilize it in their organization. Give this opportunity, I would say it’s only a matter of time before we see new service design books popping up every month.

I’m looking forward to meeting our Minister of Economics, Maria van der Hoeven. As one of the few politicians, she understands that design and creativity are essentials when it comes to innovation. I would love to share thoughts with her on how we can organize a sustainable role for creativity and design within service innovations. And, even better, how we can help businesses and organizations incorporating design as a methodology (which we call Design Thinking).

Can you list more topics for me to discuss on behalf of service design, at the
Innovation Lecture? Please comment.