As Laurie said, my name is Sue and I work at IDEO.
For those of you who don't know IDEO, we're a global design and innovation company
and we're particularly passionate about creating positive impact in the world through design.
But today I really want to talk to you about purpose and I know you've heard a lot of that over the last two days
it's something I'm particularly interested in and purpose as a consumer need and purpose as an engine for growth
for large companies as much as small companies and this is very much a personal journey as well as a work journey.
So I'm just going to take you back to my first ever job, real job about 20 years ago giving away my age was in advertising
and this was the product that I had to advertise.
Now I don't know if any of you recognise her but this is actually Cindy.
So Cindy may not have heard of but Cindy's main competitor, she's basically the British version of this lady here, Barbie.
Now I remember when I was about 21 sitting around a table and I was at the agency side
so I was trying to discover how to communicate the benefits of Cindy to little girls
and I remember sitting around a table with some very senior toy company execs and very senior agency people
and we literally had, as far as I could see, two injection moulded pieces of plastic with blonde stuff coming out of the top of their heads
there were essentially pretty much exactly the same product but it was our job to tell consumers what the difference was
and the conversation went a bit like this from Cindy's point of view and from the advertisers of Cindy.
So Cindy is the wholesome girl next door that mums want their daughters to be playing with
that mums are very happy for their daughters to grow up to be like.
Barbie, on the other hand, the baddie, Barbie is over the top, she's slightly tarty, she's a bit flash and she's got a boyfriend.
What mother would want their daughter, let alone to be playing with this sort of doll, then grow up to be that.
But the problem was, as you probably realise now, Cindy's not really around in the same way that Barbie is around these days
so Cindy didn't quite make it in the same way that Barbie did.
And in hindsight, I think what we failed to realise 20 years ago, or I failed to realise, was that little girls don't actually buy dolls for their moral code
or their bad taste in clothes.
They actually buy dolls because they provide a fantasy world, a grown up adult fantasy world.
And Barbie represents and represented grown ups.
And I was looking the other day on Wikipedia just to see the descriptions of Cindy and Barbie.
She is still around Cindy, but it literally said, doll, you can dress up next to Cindy.
Barbie had 10 careers, she'd broken up with Ken, she was about to turn 50,
and she had this entire grown up world that actually little girls were buying into.
And the reason this is important with hindsight is, we see this every day,
is that often companies are vulnerable to disruption because they don't realise the business that they're really in from their consumers perspective.
So consumer need is a huge driver in a lot of what we do.
I spent several more years having similar arguments with lots of different brands and advertising
and I thought, I've learnt a lot from Cindy and Barbie,
but there must be something more I can put my mind to, some bigger challenges that I can have an impact on.
And about 15 years later, from doing that, I joined, I discovered IDEO actually.
And IDEO was a place where I realised that there were a group of people that were helping companies
design their businesses from the consumer point of view.
So the products and services right from the beginning being designed around consumer needs,
rather than having the arguments at the end of the development process
about what little girls or the audience might want to talk about.
And I'm lucky enough in London, I run the London IDEO studio,
to work with 35 very creative designers of all different types of disciplines,
but are absolutely passionate about using design to have a positive impact in the world
through the businesses that we work with.
And along my journey from 20 years ago to more recently, I've noticed that there,
and I'm sure all of you have as well because we've been talking about it for two days,
but there has been a profound change in consumer needs, especially in the last couple of years.
Post-recession, or is it pre-double dip?
Financial meltdown, governments going bankrupt, governments in deadlock,
recently in London, teenage writers, and multiple affairs from heads of state in Italy,
right through to every sporting hero you ever thought was fantastic.
Plus the increasing consumer power driven by technology and their voice that they have.
Consumers want to interact with businesses and governments in a different way these days.
And so, as we saw yesterday, we were talking about the man who was talking about the festival,
people actually want to be part of a solution these days.
Having a purpose is a consumer need.
It is a new and growing consumer need.
Companies that will survive and thrive in the next ten years will share one thing in common.
They will allow consumers to be part of something bigger than themselves as individuals,
or as the companies that they're buying into, the brands that they're buying into.
So, I heard you Danes were a little bit cynical,
so I thought I'd better put in some evidence from my point of view and from my learning.
So, who's already doing this and what are the benefits of doing it?
What are the business benefits of doing it other than just being a nice thing to do?
So, I'm going to show you three companies that I think have been doing it from day one
and are still continuing to do it.
One close to here is IKEA.
IKEA is the biggest furniture manufacturer in the world,
but that's not what they set out to be.
What they set out to be is a company that made great design affordable for the many,
and that was from day one to now, that's still their purpose.
And guess what? Consumers really like it.
That's what's made them the largest furniture company in the world.
So, there is a benefit to having a clear purpose that people can buy into,
and that is consumer choice, which will drive growth.
Second one, Google. We've all heard of Google, used Google, a lot.
They have a really clear, you know, they were once a start-up,
but they have a really clear purpose,
which is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible.
They also happen to be, in the Fortune 100,
the number four best company to work for in 2011.
So, this is a talent advantage, yeah?
So, people, the kind of people you want to be working for your businesses,
are driven or want to be working towards a greater purpose that they can understand.
So, purpose is actually a great talent advantage.
And finally, for the big examples, Zapos.
So, Zapos, very early on in its inception,
realised that it wasn't just a shoe company,
it wanted to be the best service in the world that just happened to sell shoes.
And when they were asked, you know, in the sort of biggest growth spurt,
which was like from 2001 to 2007, I think,
they went from eight million dollar turnover to one billion in six years.
That's pretty fast.
Somebody asked them, how did you do that?
And they said, we organised everybody around a very clear purpose.
That's to be the best service company in the world.
They even moved their headquarters to LA,
where there was a 24-hour service resource there.
So, purpose also enables agile growth in large companies.
If everybody knows what direction they're going in, you're going to get there faster.
At IDEO, we've been learning about the power of purpose through open innovation.
As Larry Brilliant said from Google,
the next generation of true innovation is going to be achieved by the collective,
but not by the lone genius.
And a group of people in IDEO in about early 2009,
led by a guy designer called, a business designer actually called Tom Hume,
wanted to create a digital platform where we put the IDEO innovation process,
which is no secret, by the way,
but put it online where people could actually create together for the better.
So, for social good, it's non-for-profit,
how can we get people innovating and building on each other's ideas
around common social challenges?
And here are some of the principles that it was built on,
and then I'll tell you a bit how we launched it and what we've done so far.
The really important thing here is that it's inclusive and it's community-based.
So this isn't about the lone genius coming up with the idea,
and I think it's interesting what we heard yesterday,
is very often people think they can't make a difference as one person,
and actually this provides a community where it's not down to you as one person,
you're there to build on other people's ideas and have people build on your ideas.
So it's inclusive, it's community-centred,
it's all about collaboration, always optimistic, we're very optimistic at IDEO.
We don't like people shooting down ideas, but building on them.
It's always in beta, it's never done, it's never finished,
all the ideas are out there for anybody to take and make better.
But also importantly, there is some recognition,
and it's peer recognition.
So people giving away their time to come up with great ideas
wants some sort of recognition, not necessarily monetary though.
So here's how we introduce this.
This is our creative process, inspiration through to concepting,
through to evaluation, through to winning concepts,
and now what we're prototyping is actually realisation of concepts in the world.
We tend to step in between each of those just to synthesise things down
and make them a little bit easier for the next phase for people.
But the other really important thing is this badge of honour really,
we call it the design quotions,
but essentially each person who joins Open IDEO gets a DQ design quotient.
And the way you form and build your DQ is by how good you are,
how many volume, how many ideas you put in against these four phases,
but also how you're rated by your peers.
So you get a certain amount of points putting inspiration in,
you get double points for somebody applauding it.
And so your design quotient grows,
and everyone's design quotient is different,
and that's the point.
We're all good at different things.
So some people are fantastic at ideation.
I'm only really good at inspiration because I don't know how to draw this stuff,
but we have designers on there worldwide coming back again and again
with these fantastic ideas.
It's really easy to be an evaluator,
you just have to applaud other people's ideas and build on them.
So that's really important, peer recognition.
And then the other thing that we've just built in more recently is this actually,
and there's been a lot of talk about networking ideas,
but what we've done here is build a map, a moving map,
that basically shows the magic of where the ideas came from.
So this again is another, it's not just about the end idea,
it's about the ideas that got you there,
and the people who got you there.
So this is another really powerful tool for recognition,
but also not losing all the ideas that got you there.
So how did we want to launch that?
So that's happening at the same time that Jamie Oliver,
who is, for those of you who don't know, a famous chef,
but also activist really in the UK,
he is an activist around great food for kids in order to fight obesity.
And in 2009, he won the Ted Prize for his wish,
the Ted Prize wish, to teach every child in the US,
now there's a challenge, about food in order to fight obesity.
Obesity being the number one killer now in the US above everything else,
drives heart disease, diabetes.
And if you have a look at his film on this, it's really interesting,
it's something we can actually do something about.
So, you know, if someone said,
you can do this about cancer, everybody would be all over it,
we can do something about obesity.
So IDO offered a certain amount of time,
which included me and two other people.
So I was working with Jamie Oliver and his food revolution in the States.
Which is something he was never going to do by himself.
No one person is going to change the way that America eats.
And I don't know if you've seen the programs he's been doing recently,
but he's getting quite a tough time.
So one of the things we wanted to do is make it a ground up,
you know, people buying into the revolution and being a part of it,
not just being told what to do.
And I thought, what better way to launch open IDO
and get people involved beyond just signing the petition
than to launch a challenge on open IDO.
It's a great way to launch an open innovation site
because it's not a difficult challenge,
yet it's a challenge that everybody is really passionate about.
It's quite easy to get involved with this and have good ideas.
Elements that were important, one,
was a little bit of encouragement for people to get involved.
Jamie kindly did that for us.
He did a little video that we put on the site
and talked about it and tweeted about it
and encouraged people to get involved in it.
We also launched it through the TED community group of people
that are very passionate about changing the world.
And then, yes, so introducing people to somebody who needs help.
Jamie Oliver needs help, right?
And the kids in America need help to change the way that they're eating
so they don't become obese.
And then, finally, some reward,
and actually in the end,
Jamie Oliver sort of emailed everybody
who came up with the winning 17 concepts
and said, thank you, plus a peer recognition.
But what this did was, literally in three weeks of the launch,
it got 7,500 users from 166 different territories and countries.
That's quite amazing in three weeks,
in terms of the interest, the breadth of the interest,
to be part of something bigger than yourself
and to help, you know, to be part of the solution.
Excuse me.
The final 17 concepts,
which were anything what businesses could do to families, to government,
were actually put into a digital toolkit
that anybody could use again, open to everybody.
And Jamie put that on his site
when he launched the Food Revolution site.
That's great, you've signed the petition now.
Here's some tools.
This is the next thing to do to help, you know, get kids engaged in food
and fight obesity.
So that was the launch of it.
And, you know, in terms of showing that purpose is a consumer need,
I mean, the response to this and the engagement in this
is kind of starting to demonstrate, I think, that.
And people spend, you know,
now we have 18,000 community members
across even more countries,
but people spend an average of four minutes,
but they spend up to four hours on the site that anyone go.
And that is really giving away your time to a bigger solution.
It shows a passion there.
Just two other examples.
Just to kind of demonstrate how big existing companies
can start to live up to the purpose,
whether they were born with it
or whether they've, you know, agreed it more recently.
But Unilever, a very large international company,
teamed up with Wassup,
which is water sanitation for the urban poor,
to tackle a really big global challenge.
And that is that one billion city dwellers globally
don't actually have access to sanitation in their own homes.
So this is an interesting challenge.
This is a big challenge.
And Unilever's overall purpose is about creating a better future
for people every day.
This ties up nicely. This is a better future, sanitation.
And the interesting thing about having a partner
is it adds expertise,
but it also brings in a different audience
onto the innovation platform.
Lots of ideas came out of this.
The winning idea that's being prototyped at the moment
in a city called Kamazi in Ghana,
which has a population of about 2.5 million people,
under 20% of people there have a toilet in their home.
So they're already paying to go to public toilets.
And the idea, the sort of winning concept,
was a franchisee idea
that Unilever would develop, manufacture portable toilets,
train locals to basically rent portable toilets to locals
and then charge them a weekly or monthly fee to pick up the waste.
And then eventually, as they grew their business, they could buy the toilets.
And so it was quite a sustainable business solution
for addressing waste with the urban poor.
Now, that's good. That's all great.
That's creating a better future every day.
But what's the business opportunity here for Unilever?
Well, Unilever sells in products in over 180 countries,
as I'm sure you know, but 50% of their revenue comes from emerging markets.
And they believe that if they can make people happier, healthier
and more prosperous in emerging markets,
then they're going to be more likely to buy their products.
Now, you can be cynical about that,
or you can say that is really living up,
starting to live up to your purpose
and invest in your future consumers.
Finally, on an open idea.
Oh, and the other thing, this is a quote from the Unilever client.
It also helps to be really nimble.
So they did, in a couple of weeks,
would have taken them internally,
nine months to try and wrangle around.
So it's a good way to be more nimble as a company.
The third one is Sony, another large international company.
And they wanted to basically use technology
as a way to create a sustainable future
for people to build that with them.
And what they did was share seven of their technology.
So it's the first time they've shared IP,
so openly, with the open idea community,
to try and realise this, you know,
what are the technological solutions
we can come up with to make a better planet.
And the winning concept on this,
which is being prototyped at the moment,
is a green book application.
It's basically a cross-platform application
that uses geo-location and gaming technology,
and allows you to hook up with friends or colleagues
in a particular place at a particular time
and link that up to volunteer needs, yeah?
So if I was in Copenhagen yesterday and I had two hours free,
I could go, who else wants to help me spend two hours?
And what's the need? What's the voluntary need?
So now what's interesting about this for Sony,
the business advantage is one,
it's helping them to get the platform of a sustainable future
through technology higher up in their agenda internally,
but it's also allowing them to connect with their consumers
in a completely different way, and they've been used to.
So, final part, some beauty stuff.
So how can you harness this growing need?
Companies come to us all the time
asking these two questions now, and now what?
What am I doing with my business now,
and what should I be doing in the future,
and how can they inform each other?
Now is where established companies tend to spend
most of 80% of their time in focus,
is making things more efficient,
increasing volume, reducing costs,
you know, that's where most of the focus is.
But actually what they need to look at is the now what.
Is where most start-ups and entrepreneurs
spend all their time.
So how can we help, and how can I think that
purpose can actually be a growth engine
to help large, medium-sized companies
to understand what business they should be in in the future,
and that should actually drive
and form a virtuous circle as to what they should be doing today as well.
So in conclusion, some questions, some hypotheses.
See if you agree.
Can we assume that people are fundamentally good
and want us to help them, us companies, government,
bigger organisations, do the right thing?
I certainly believe so,
and I think that purpose is therefore
a new consumer need that we can use in business.
Can we assume that burning-eyed talent,
the sort of talent that you want to have in your business,
is a business advantage?
If it is, then purpose is also a talent advantage
because you're going to get the best people,
the most creative and passionate people.
And finally, can companies play a more purposeful role
in people's lives in order to carve themselves
a sustainable future?
And I believe they can, and I believe purpose is a growth engine
to enable them to do that.
And just to conclude, this is something we always say in the London office,
can we do great work whilst making others successful,
successful in the most holistic term?
Thank you.
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