Designing Relevance - Nokia and Face Open Innovation Case Study (ESOMAR 2010)

ONLINE RESEARCH 2010

PART 4 / ONLINE CROSSOVER: MOBILE RESEARCH

DESIGNING RELEVANCE
HOW OPEN AND AGILE RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES CAN HELP
COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS RESPOND TO CHANGE AND STAY
RELEVANT
Francesco D’Orazio
Esther Garland
Tom Crawford

EMERGENCE VS. CREATION
As Arthur C. Clarke put it, “It is impossible to predict the future, and all attempts to do so in any detail appear
ludicrous within a very few years.” This is true for the futurist but even more so for the researcher whose
challenge is innovation. We should be at once more realistic and more ambitious about it. Innovation is not
about trying to describe the future, but about defining “the boundaries within which possible futures must
lie”. (Arthur C. Clarke, 1962)

This also means innovation should not be so much about ‘creation’, but more about ‘emergence’. Defining
the boundaries of possible futures means creating the conditions for fostering the emergence of ideas that
are already taking shape in the social space, but have not filtered up to the top or are not formed enough to
bubble up yet. In a connected real-time ecosystem where the consumer can be as creative as the designer,
the new model of innovation should be listening, reducing complexity, decoding the signal from the noise,
collaborating with consumers and only then defining the boundaries of possible futures.

With this mindset, in 2009 Nokia launched Project Relevance, a new research programme aimed at
securing relevance for the brand within the upper end of the smartphone marketplace, with a focus on
North America.

THE RELEVANCE PROGRAMME
The Relevance Programme demonstrates Nokia’s desire to continue placing consumer focussed “solutions”
right at the front of their operations.

Relevance was defined as “high significance to the landscape of consumer needs, technology and business
ecosystems”. North America was chosen as the lead market for this work as this was where the most
advanced web and mobile web usage patterns were developing.

A ‘solution’ was defined as the combination of Device, Software, Business planning, Design and Marketing;
different aspects of the innovation process that should be pulled together from the start in order to provide
an optimal experience for the consumer, but aspects that in so many organisations in fact happen
sequentially.

Copyright © ESOMAR 2010 1



The Relevance Program shows how a complex organization can respond to the challenges of rapid
exponential change through open and agile approaches. This paper describes the work that has been
carried out by Face and Nokia within the Relevance Programme and will demonstrate how collaborative
methodologies can lead product innovation, test products still on the drawing board or not even conceived,
and anticipate future trends and consumer behaviour. The paper will also show how online, face-to-face
and mobile approaches can be integrated in one project stream and how online research complements and
enhances traditional research rather than being an alternative to it.

THE BUSINESS CONTEXT AND THE CHALLENGES
Nokia had a challenge on its hands: to regain and drive thought leadership at the high end of the North
American smartphone market.

Previous research had shown that:
1. Consumers were less aware of Nokia’s high end offerings in NAM;
2. Nokia offered a wide variety of services and outstanding device functionality but was not engendering as
much delight and ‘relevance’ in the user experience as they would like in order to become the top
partner for the consumer.

Although these factors were common across both the range of markets and consumer segments that Nokia
operates in, the main assumption was that the problem was most acute at the high end. Evolving the UX and
brand positioning here would insure the rest of the market would follow.

This was not the first time that questions had been asked about the brand performance in NAM. But this
time it was felt that to get different results it needed a different approach both internally and externally.
Everyone agreed on one thing - it needed to be a research approach that enabled the relevance, insight,
solutions, and design teams to work together and create an insight-driven dialogue with consumers and
turn it into a collaborative process in order to address the following challenges:

1. Regaining the position of ‘thought leaders’ in the mobile space and occupying the desirable position of
‘Innovator’;
2. Demonstrating with innovative and relevant solutions that Nokia is leading the way;
3. Improving Nokia’s performance and traction in NAM (as a direct result of delivering on the above two
challenges).

From the challenges on the table it was clear that the output of the project needed to be more than just
insights or learnings. It had to translate quickly into solutions that could be actioned into brand and
commercial strategies capable of helping Nokia to regain their brand position.




THE BRIEF
At the core of the brief there was the belief that in order to regain a thought-leadership position the classic
Nokia franchise of ‘Connecting People’ had to be re-invented by focussing on making its core assets more
relevant. In other words, Connecting People through Relevance.

The business was conscious that in a technology environment where innovation is usage- and experience-
led the point is not inventing from scratch. Instead innovation should start with observing what people are
doing, understanding their experiences, and then increasing the value of those practices through surfacing
what is relevant and evolving it into fully formed solutions. The question was - how?

The business recognized that this was a challenging brief and it was convinced that a new insight and
innovation approach was needed to ensure the strategic vision and developed solutions would be
consumer-driven, and that the outputs of the programme would be delivered as quickly as possible.

With this in mind Face was briefed to help Nokia define what “relevance” means for today’s and tomorrow’s
leading edge smartphone users and create a number of consumer-driven cross-platform propositions that
would allow them to leapfrog into the position of delivering the most relevant global solutions.

This vision for relevance had to be articulated into a series of strategic innovation principles. Each one of
these principles would be a way of understanding the world as it is now and will be in the future; each
would provide a series of strategic approaches that could support existing and future consumer needs; and
each would be translated into seed ideas and fully formed solutions that could support these visions of
relevance and act as differentiators.

On the basis of this brief, the research objectives were articulated as follows:

! Define the value of ‘relevance’ and what it is to consumers;
! Uncover the ‘hacks’ that consumers are employing to make their current mobile experience more
‘relevant’;
! Co-create with consumers the user experience and design for a future generation of Nokia ‘solutions’
that deliver on the value of “relevance”
! Work with the Nokia Relevance team to output use cases, personas and user experience maps that can
be taken into further concept definition;
! Refine, develop and prioritise the outputs collaboratively;
! Relate solution ‘concepts’ to potential Device, SW and peripheral development;
! Support development of business cases for the top solutions (Where’s the market, will they buy it, does
it have the capacity to meet the key success criteria;
! Uncover people’s perceptions of the barriers / stress test the user journey that results, and to do all this
in a new and innovative way.




WHAT WE DID
In order to answer this brief effectively we knew we had to design a research program that would be at the
same time inclusive but targeted, open but strategic, experiential but conceptual.

Again, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote, when trying to imagine what the future might look like, two dangers lie
ahead: Failure of Nerve and Failure of Imagination. The Failure of Nerve occurs when even given all the
relevant facts we cannot see that they point to an inescapable conclusion, which basically comes down to
the available facts/insights not being marshalled correctly. A famous example of this kind of failure is Sir
Simon Newcomb at the beginning of the 20th century discounting the possibility of flying machines by
incorrectly marshalling the facts of aerodynamics.

On the other hand, the Failure of Imagination occurs when the really vital facts are still undiscovered and
the possibility of their existence is not admitted. A clear example of this kind of failure is represented by
Auguste Comte’s dismissal of the possibility of a chemical or mineralogical understanding of heavenly
bodies. An assertion that a few decades later would be utterly refuted by the invention of the spectroscope
and the consequent takeover of astrophysics on astronomy.

The first failure can be avoided with a solid evaluation process of the insights generated and the
involvement of experts and specialists of the researched field who can recognize where the ‘facts’ are
pointing towards. On the other hand, the second type of failure can be avoided by doing the exact opposite:
involving non-experts. Too much knowledge can burden the imagination.

With this in mind, a few principles guided the design of the research programme:

1. Open up. Allow ideas to come from anywhere and allow consumers to take you to places you wouldn’t
expect to be taken to. Opening up helps keep the Failure of Imagination at bay by enabling contributions
by non-experts or non-professional users. Opening up the innovation process translates into listening
and analysing relevant conversations on the web, broadcasting insights and idea generation tasks
through crowdsourcing models and co-creating solutions with consumers. However, it doesn’t
necessarily help stop the Failure of Nerve...
2. Bottom up is not enough. Bottom-up processes are great but in order to be effective they need to be
complemented by solid strategic direction and expertise. Successful innovations emerge at the
intersection of three, sometimes very different, agendas: the consumer and his needs, the brand and its
strategy (vision, strategy, commercial viability), the expert and his vision (tech trends, design principles,
market trends). This is why open innovation works best when implemented through a hybrid model that
brings these agendas together and fosters the collaboration of consumers, experts and stakeholders
rather than handing over control entirely to either the consumers or the designers.
3. Start broad and funnel down. Listening is key before starting any design effort. The web gives us the
opportunity to listen to conversations and observe consumers’ interactions in a ‘natural’ environment. In
a way it allows us to apply elements of the qualitative approach on a mass scale and in a cost-effective
way. It is about reversing the research funnel, starting by consulting the crowd, moving on to work with
defined online communities, then collaborating with an intimate group of co-creators. But starting broad
is not just about social media analysis and crowd-sourcing, it’s a principle that needs to be applied to



every stage of the process to avoid limiting scope too early in the investigation. To use Donald
Rumsfeld’s lexicon, truly breakthrough innovation comes from identifying and solving unknown
unknowns, rather than just the known unknowns.
4. Allow group thinking as well as individual thinking. Group thinking is generative and provides elements of
validation, but it is also skewed towards social conformity. On the other hand, individual thinking
provides a more independent idea generation process but it’s not generative. The best ideas often come
from building on each other’s contribution rather than coming up with the final solution in one go. A
balanced innovation process needs to ensure both the dynamics are well represented.
5. Telling stories for better design. Storytelling is the art of crafting and presenting life and all of its varied
experiences in enjoyable, rational chunks that invite the audience to feel as much as think. As a part of
user experience design, stories serve to ground the work in a real context. They are an effective way to
collect, analyze and share qualitative information from user research, spark design imagination and help
us create usable products. But most importantly, they help keep people at the center of the work. An
experiential approach to idea generation, idea development and idea testing is key to generating better
user experiences.
6. Cross-over. We live in a post-digital ecosystem where online has become an additional layer to the
offline experience and location is rapidly becoming the key added value of the online experience through
mobile technologies. If we want real insight we must engage consumers in their natural environment. As
a result, the research mix we use must mirror the engagement dynamics of this hybrid ecosystem and
live across mobile, web and face-to-face.
7. Rapid prototyping. Prototyping makes idea development playful and social and is naturally generative. As
the consumers, the brand teams and the designers work through the prototyping process they are going
to generate hundreds of iterations, spin-offs and completely new ideas. Because building on each
other’s ideas is key to crafting successful solutions, being able to translate some of the seed ideas
generated along the way into tangible ‘objects’ that people can play with is crucial. However one of the
main challenges of using prototyping in an innovation programme is that it needs to be ongoing and real-
time. This is why researchers, strategists and ‘makers’ have to work together and in real-time
throughout the entire process.

These principles guided us in structuring the research programme in five stages – Download, Explore,
Create, Craft/Refine and Validate – and across five milestones – UX Themes, Consumers Needs, Seed
Ideas, Propositions, Solutions – that have been respectively hit at completion of each stage.

Glossary of the terms used in the programme description:
• Theme : a descriptor that map and categorise the various ways consumers interact with mobile
technology and the mobile web;
• Scenario: a setting in which consumers have to respond to a challenge in order to achieve a goal;
• Actions: actions consumers put into place to respond to a challenge in a given scenario;
• Micro-needs: specific needs behind the actions that a consumer puts into place to respond to a
challenge in a given scenario;
• Macro-needs: clustered sets of micro-needs;



• Seed ideas: initial ideas emerging from the online community and crowd-sourcing idea generation tasks;
• Propositions: seed ideas crafted into more complex concepts and enriched by use cases, personas, user
journeys, needs maps and experience maps;
• Solutions: optimised propositions including business cases.

1. Download – Social Media Analysis & Experts Workshop
Understanding relevance means understanding consumer experience. We started by mapping these
experiences and classifying the various dimensions of the interaction with mobile technology.

The project kicked off with a two week Social Media Monitoring and Trends Analysis programme using
netnography, semantic and network analysis across forums, social networks, blogs, news sites, microblogs,
video and photo sharing sites from the United States. Using Face’s social media analysis platform Pulsar we
tracked more than 100, 000 ‘sources’ (where Twitter counts as one source) and harvested almost 1.5
million items of content. These were analysed to gather insight into how key consumer segments in North
America talk about smart-phones and which key themes, topics and angles were most resonant with them.
Analysing conversations amongst users talking to each other rather than responding to researchers yielded
a huge amount of richness. Furthermore, this helped develop clear learnings on language, tone of voice and
attitudes to the brand and the category. It allowed for a different kind of research landscape, one which
subverts the traditional question and answer format and replaces it with something far more natural and
intuitive. By working in a more natural communication mode we also ended up expanding our research
agenda to challenges we didn’t even know existed or that we wanted to investigate.

Thanks to this analysis we identified more than 25 ‘themes’; descriptors that mapped and categorised the
various ways consumers interact with mobile technology, for example storytelling/self-casting or device
proactivity/coincidence engineering. We then took these ‘themes’ into an expert workshop held in London
with mobile and social web experts and designers as well as the Nokia solutions teams. The themes were
clustered and prioritized according to a number of criteria such as “brand consistency- Nokianess”,
“universality of the needs behind the theme” and “social currency?” The clustering and prioritisation process
resulted in a set of ten final ‘themes’ which were then taken to the next stage.

2. Explore – Immersion/ Face to Face session
Following the download stage, designed to bring together learnings from a varied team of brains inside and
around the business and from the wider web, it was time to take those learnings on board and start to move
down the funnel towards platforms for innovation.

The previous stage led to the team producing 10 “themes” which would form the start points to lead us into
the next stages of research. Broadly areas that map the ways in which people use digital/mobile
technologies such as (gaining and sharing) knowledge, and (achieving) intimacy, these themes were
designed to be broad enough to allow consumers to generate multiple stories, scenarios and use cases
within them. This would better help us uncover unmet needs, frustrations and workarounds, and these in
turn would present opportunities for innovation for Nokia.




The key questions we had to answer now were:

! How were consumers engaged in activities surrounding these themes? What were the delights and
where was the pain?
! What was the role of mobile and technology in facilitating that? What were the examples of where
technology made things better and where conventional means were preferred?
! What did the themes mean to consumers and what might they expect from technology to make things
better and more relevant.
! What were the ‘hacks’ and workarounds that people were employing that we could learn from?
! We took Knowledge, Intimacy and eight other broad themes into a one day face to face immersion
workshop in New York. Due to the nature of the brief – ultimately step changing and redefining Nokia’s
traction in the NAM market – this was not a workshop that could be done either in a traditional way or
with traditional respondents.

Through a rigorous recruitment process that involved standard screening, telephone interviews and face to
face meetings we recruited 16 highly tech savvy young adults who were leading the way in interaction with
digital and mobile technologies. A key criteria was that our respondents were using or combining
technologies in unusual ways to meet their needs, or in fact starting to reject mainstream technologies all
together due to frustration. The key to the success of this and the following stages was finding “the
adfluentials” in this consumer segment - those consumers who were engaged in the category and had the
mix of skills to create and collaborate. We also took nine Nokia stakeholders and experts and threw them
into the mix too, in order to create an environment where consumers and experts could really collaborate.

Our 25 co-creators were then split into teams formed of “consumers”, client stakeholders and experts.
Each team were given “themes” to explore, with social, technology and market trends and expert “think
pieces” used to further stimulate the teams.

Through a combination of storytelling, scenario exploration and future projection we uncovered a range of
scenarios, actions, met and unmet needs, barriers, frustrations and “hacks” that consumers were using to
participate in each of the themes in their everyday lives. (See figure 1.)

By ensuring that the focus was kept broad (i.e., not limited at this stage to digital/mobile technologies), we
were able to understand how the themes transcended and touched all aspects of their lives, and where
there might be opportunities for new smartphone solutions. The audience we had recruited would naturally
talk about technology in each of these themes but we didn’t want to restrict them to the status quo by
mandating a tech focus, as we believe that is never where truly breakthrough ideas come from.

The stories and role plays the teams produced allowed us to build up a huge list of needs (both met and
unmet, stated and unstated), barriers and hacks underneath each theme. These were taken into a
stakeholder workshop the following day in order to begin to cluster, and prioritise both the emergent themes
and needs underneath them. The result was a reduced number of “macro needs” that we had identified as
truly relevant and resonant for the NAM market, underpinned by ‘micro needs’ that would ultimately drive
ideation.




Taking our example of “Knowledge”, core needs identified included aggregating access (accessing multiple
sources at a single time and point), providing social and spatial context, and systems that learn. These
needs were used to feed into the next stage of the process; online community and crowdsourcing.

FIGURE 1
INNOVATION PROCESS VISUALIZED | EXPLORE

3. Create - online community and crowdsourcing
In order to allow exploration with a larger number of consumers across a wider geographical base, and to
better mirror the hybrid ecosystem our consumers actually live in, we then took the project online.

Working with our bespoke mobile community platform, MyFaceCommunity, we built a community with 30
fresh tech leader consumers. In order to validate the work conducted in the previous sessions we began by
asking consumers to tell us stories about the identified micro needs that would generate spontaneous,
“realistic” scenarios. Consumers were then asked to analyse those scenarios to identify current
experiences, actions, touchpoints and the barriers and frustrations associated with those which would go on
to be used as the basis for consumer ideation. Additionally consumers were asked to send status updates



via their mobiles each time one of the identified needs surfaced in their everyday life. The mobile nature of
the community allowed us to fit the research program into consumer’s lives rather than being an alien
activity, which provided us with richer insights and a more solid grounding of the innovation platforms.

Following some clustering and analysis, the consumer generated scenarios and problems were played back
to the community, who voted on the most resonant and interesting ones. They were then asked to
individually brainstorm ideas for “solutions” (that could work with existing hardware) that would better work
in these scenarios. In turn, these ideas were played back into the community, allowing the wider community
to build and refine each other’s’ ideas, which meant the ideas with the most traction naturally rose to the
top. (See figure 2).

FIGURE 2
INNOVATION PROCESS VISUALIZED | CREATE

It was incredibly fruitful – in less than a week 30 consumers generated over 450 different ideas. Through
the process of collaborative tagging, editing and voting, this number was refined to nine clearly relevant
solutions, routed in true consumer insight.




In a design process parallel to the consumer generated ideation, the Nokia stakeholder team had also been
busy concepting using the outputs from the Immersion stage and matching those with ideas and
technologies that they already had in the business. These concepts were fed into the online community
following the consumer ideation as “technology enablers” – ideas that could enable and inspire consumers
to build, develop or combine their own ideas or vice versa.

The result was a final set of consumer “grown” seed ideas that represented a true amalgamation of
consumer and client thinking and that could be taken into the next stage of co-creation where they could be
crafted and refined into solutions.

4. Craft and refine - co-creation/ face-to-face workshop
Running parallel to the consumer crowdsourcing, the Relevance team was also working up Strategic
Principles that would direct Nokia’s business strategy in delivering relevance to the NAM market.

These strategic principles were developed as a result of the insight generated around the themes from the
immersion and exploration in the online community. They allowed us to move our areas of focus from being
simply functional dimensions of the tech world or user experience, to “points of view” for the company to
deliver solutions to the market within that dimension.

To use one of our previous examples, from the theme of Knowledge the strategic principle becomes
Delivering Wisdom – making knowledge actionable and truly useful to the receiver when/where/how he
needs it, so wiring knowledge into the context of the user experience. Similarly Intimacy becomes Continual
Partial Togetherness – providing ways for people to feel connected all the time in a more ambient and fluid
sense.

We returned to New York, and gathered our original tech leader co-creator and stakeholder/expert team in
order to explore these Strategic Principles and to conduct the final stage of solutions development.

We used a co-creation process that enabled the client and consumers to truly create together - we call this
Helix. Our Helix process meant we were able to get consumers to ideate a huge range of solutions around
the strategic principles by showing Nokia what they wanted rather than just telling them. For Nokia
stakeholders, spending one day co-creating directly with (and not just listening to) the target audience was a
new and exciting experience and crucial investment in the future of their brand. This investment of time not
only yielded huge empathy with the target audience but it also allowed conversations about solutions to
grow and flourish over time (see figure 3).




FIGURE 3
INNOVATION PROCESS VISUALIZED | CRA FT

Again, using storytelling and scenarios, consumers explored the strategic principles to spontaneously ratify
the solutions concepts generated as a result of the online stage, before reviewing the concepts developed
and beginning to co-create their execution in the form of use cases and user journeys.

These use cases would form the basis of experience maps for the design team, while the user journeys
would help form the basis of fully rounded propositions for the commercial team by detailing how
consumers expected to engage with each idea. By working directly with consumers to generate use cases
and user journeys the Nokia team were able to really put Rapid Prototyping into play: working as equals to
solve a problem meant design became naturally iterative and agile.

At the end of this stage, nine fully rounded consumer-generated propositions had been crafted and four
Nokia-generated propositions had been built-on and refined. It was now time for the solutions team to go
away and make the most of the concepts and the learning gathered so far before moving into the final stage
of the process: Validation.



5. Validate – discussion groups
Finally, a series of face-to-face discussion groups across five different consumer segments in New York,
San Francisco and Chicago were carried out to test and validate the co-created propositions and turn them
into proper “solutions”.

The aim of these groups was to select the most relevant propositions, optimise them, and provide enough
background for a final go-to-market decision and strategy.

The assessment of the final propositions revolved around four areas:
1. Understanding whether they were truly future-facing (challenging, proactive technology, tools and not
just gimmicks, making my virtual world better, being part of the world as it will be);
2. Understanding how they fulfilled or matched up with the requirements of the Nokia mission (positioning
Nokia as a thought-leader, working across various ecosystems, highly monetizable, appealing for the top
end of the market)
3. Understanding the key drivers of appeal across the propositions
4. Understanding the key drivers of concern across the propositions

After 12 groups it was clear that we had hit a relevance nerve and the solutions all carried the winning gene
that would make them relevant and appealing to the target audience in NAM. Furthermore, some of the
propositions could be easily clustered together to form more complex solutions which could go to market
with no further development.

One of the key developments of the discussions groups was the emergence of two key appealing features
across the various propositions and the need to combine them. It was found that it was the intersection
between these features that was the sweet spot for delivering both relevance and innovation.

After having created and validated ideas with high end consumers throughout the whole process, this final
stage gave us a clear snapshot of the potential market reaction for all consumer segments. This helped us
turn 13 great propositions into two solid concepts which are now in development.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS
The final output saw a range of relevance visions being taken into Nokia’s concepting and design agenda for
2012.

Given the nature of the project, the research process had been designed to start very broad, providing a
rich initial insight and pool of ideas, and then progressively narrow down the options towards the final
results, providing consumer-driven creativity and validation at every stage. It was both iterative and
generative, leading to the discovery of unknown unknowns as well as known unknowns.

By balancing online and face-to-face approaches, the process allowed us to stimulate group thinking and
individual thinking, both crucial elements to the creative process that complement each other and generate
more solid solutions.




It also delivered better results, faster due to the agile nature of the research design and the consumer
involvement all the way through the process.

This was a seminal project for Nokia as an organization, not only for the breadth of the topic and the
challenging objectives but also because it introduced a new way of listening and interacting with consumers
by treating them as partners rather than just respondents and engaging them in the process from beginning
to end.

REFERENCES
Clarke Arthur C. (1962), Profiles of the Future, London, Pan Books

THE AUTHORS
Francesco D’Orazio is Research Director and Head of Social Media, Face, United Kingdom.

Esther Garland is Associate Research Director, Face, United Kingdom.

Tom Crawford is Director / Head of Concepting and Portfolio, Consumer Analytics and Insights (CA&I), Nokia, United
Kingdom.


Designing Relevance - Nokia and Face Open Innovation Case Study (ESOMAR 2010)

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