 In this episode we'll talk about if designers should drive innovation and what are the key characteristics of design innovators. We'll also talk about how to introduce a new design culture in an existing organization. And here's the guest for this episode. Hi, this is Mauro Porcini and this is the service design show. If you want to create more impact and change the world for the better as a service designer, then you've come to the right place. Hi all, my name is Marc Fontijn and this is the service design show. On this show you get the chance to learn from some of the world's best service designers. We talk about topics ranging from design thinking, customer experience, organizational change and creative leadership. If these are the topics you're interested in, know that we bring a new video every week. So if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to subscribe to the channel. My guest on this episode is nobody less than Mauro Porcini. Mauro is currently in the role of the chief design officer at PepsiCo. For the next 30 minutes or so, Mauro will be talking about if design should drive innovation and if it does, what are the key characteristics of design innovators? And finally, we'll talk about how can you introduce a new design culture into an existing organization. So that was it for the introduction and now let's jump straight into the interview with Mauro. Welcome to the show, Mauro. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's the people who are listening to the podcast can't see it, but you're in Manhattan and I'm in Utrecht, both almost the same, right? Yeah, I mean, I think they're both charming locations, right? Manhattan and the beautiful canal of all lands, beautiful places. Mauro, I asked this question to everybody on the show, but I don't know if you have the answer. I'm really curious, do you remember the very first time you got in touch with the term service design? It was a university. I studied Milan in the 90s and Polytechnic of Milan was pretty advanced on design. It was much more pretty products and nice packaging. And so service design was really part of the way of thinking and learning a polytechnic. And this was back in 1994? I studied in 1994 and one of the key advocates of service design, I remember, was Ezio Manzini. So he's one of the key leaders of the university, one of our professors and he was really, really passionate about this idea of service design. It's good to know that we're on the same level, so I'm happy to have your topics here. You gave me three really interesting topics and I gave you some question starters and it's up to you to make the questions as hard or as easy for you as you want, right? Are you ready? Go! Okay, I'll do them in a random order because it's Monday morning for you and you're still have a fresh mind. So the first topic I'll pick is design. Does design drive innovation or do you have a question starter? Why? So why does design drive innovation? Why does design should drive innovation? You know, when you go to conferences, you read books on design, it feels like we should drive innovation. We own innovation because what we do is all about deeply understanding people, their needs, wants and dreams. And then understanding our companies of the brands we work for, so understanding the business strategy, connecting the two insights, what is relevant for people and what is relevant for a business, and then leveraging our tools, the ability to prototype, to do, to create. We dream and then we create and then we execute solutions for all of this. So by definition, what is that? It's innovation. It's what any company calls innovation. So now you go back to these organizations, to these big corporations or small enterprises, and you look at the people that drive innovation in these companies. And most of the time, it's R&D, so it's science, or it's marketing, it's business. There are entire themes, legions of business innovation people. And often designers don't play the kind of role. So at the end, the two end of the spectrum is we do own innovation, we own anything, or the other end of the spectrum is we work on graphic design, on product design, we work on the aesthetic of things, we work on putting that lipstick on the peak. So those are the two extremes, and there is a lot in the middle. The problem is that do we want to own innovation, because only innovation means a series of responsibilities that we need to take over on the strategy of the business, on being accountable for specific return on investments, on a variety of different tasks that are not core on what we do, doing things and understanding people. And the problem is that if we don't do that, if we just put ourselves on the front end of innovation, on the understanding of people, we miss a key role that eventually can cripple our ability to really change the game. And the role is the role of prioritizing what is relevant or not for that innovation process. You know, if we don't take decision on what to go to market with, then other people with a different background, we need to take that kind of decision, and then we will have problems, because they won't understand what we eventually see as a community. And when I talk about this, many people, you know, push back and eventually, you know, tell me, well, but innovation is by definition cross-functional. And I totally agree. You need all the different backgrounds and functions in that. But at the end of the day, you need somebody leading it. And that person is to have a specific kind of background. And it's not just one person, but it's a big organization like ours with thousands and thousands of people. You need multiple leaders. Are those leader parts of the design community or they're part of the innovation, business innovation or the innovation community? That's the critical question we need to ask ourselves as professional and as a community. Super interesting, because I think a lot of designers struggle to actually take that responsibility. Yes. I mean, often because we don't have the skills, we're not trained to do that. The business skills. The finance skills. The pure finance strategy skills. Other times, we don't want to do that because it's not fun. You know, to understand how to execute something, you know, all the constraints from a manufacturer standpoint. But not a macro level. A macro level is easy. No. You know, making your hands dirty and really working with the factories to understand how to manufacture something, working up front on the financial strategy. Being accountable for X millions or hundreds of millions or sometimes billions of dollars of innovation pipeline. So all of those areas are things that either we take over and we decide to own them with experts under them under us. But we need to, you know, manage them or we decide not to. And we decide to play the role of the challengers, the influencers. They could be a totally legitimate role. The problem is that you need to have on the other side a business leader that understand what you're talking about and empower you to do the right thing. And sometimes it does happen. Take a company like Apple, for instance. Other times it doesn't happen. And that's where the problems come. And then most of the time it doesn't happen. So at what moment did you get the feeling that at PepsiCo you got the opportunity to actually take that role? What was the turning point? What was the shift that they said, OK, design is going to lead innovation? You know, even at PepsiCo we are in a journey. We are in a dialogue among innovation leaders. You know, me with a design background, but we have business people. We are really people in the organization as well. So the good thing at PepsiCo is that it's a very healthy dialogue and design is listened to. And so I am finding a specific situation driven by specific leaders now in the company that allow us to impact the way we do innovation. But it takes time. It takes really time. You need to build as many proof points as possible. You need to show what your vision and how your vision can impact the company. And proof point after proof point, then and just then, the company will start to realize that they need to give you more possibilities to really help and drive innovation with them at the beginning and then more and more to take ownership. But again, we are in a journey. I cannot say that design drive innovation in the company. We are a very, very important player together with other parts of the organization and probably more advanced than many other organizations we see out there in this. Let's move on to topic number two. And maybe we touched already upon this one. And I just written down really quickly, so I hope I spelled it right. It's characteristics. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? Who are these design thinkers? What are the characteristics of these design thinkers? Well, they are, before anything else, dreamers and entrepreneurs. So not just dreamers. Dreamers imply the ability to think big, to think the future, to envision the future, to dream the future. Entrepreneurs imply the ability to transform that in action, in doing things. The dream is the potential is linked to intuition and vision. And this idea of entrepreneurship is the ability to transform that dream and intuition in something concrete that people can interact with. So connected to that, you need people that are curious. Curiosity is the key characteristic of any design thinker. Curiosity pushes you to ask questions, to look at something that everybody looks at with different eyes, with the eyes of a kid, with the naivete of a kid. And so in curiosity is linked to traveling, to reading, to talking with people, to networking. It all starts within when they ask me, what inspires you? Inspiration comes from within. And then you can unlock inspiration. Anything out there is a catalyst, but it all starts from within with that kind of curiosity. Then you need to absolutely have resilience. You need to be resistant and optimistic because if you're really changing things, you will face tons of roadblocks. If you don't find roadblocks, it means you're not changing anything. So you have to have that kind of mindset that every time you find a roadblock, you go back to your dream and you get the energy you need in your dream. Because often you find those difficulties during the day and that you need to overcome and probably you cannot get energy out of those. Actually, they take you down. And if you think about us as designers, more technically, we need to be holistic designers. You go to school for industrial design, for graphic design, for architecture. And while in reality design leaders today, the leaders that can help biggest small enterprises to succeed, need to have a vision of design that is 360 degrees because those brands are going to be on stage 24-7 on every touch point. So it's the product, it's the packaging, it's communication, it's digital. It's physical experiences and therefore it's architecture, interior design, user experience. So all these aspects and as designers, we need to redirect and coordinate all of these with the brands that we have that exist. And if you think about innovation, so the new products and new brands that could come to life, we need to envision brands across every touch point. And then we need to be business savvy. You know, this idea of the designer that is this creative mind and dress weird and is totally disconnected from the business, it's okay, but it's wrong in the meantime. It's okay because yes, there will be people that are not business savvy that have a creativity that is unbelievable and we want them in our company. We want them in PepsiCo, we want them. But they play a specific role. You put them in a bucket and you let them go. But if we as a community, we want to impact and influence the business, if we want to change the world, if we want to create value for people and society, then we need to interface ourselves with the business. So we need designers that can talk that kind of language, that can interact with the business world and they can articulate the value of what we do for them so that they can empower us to change the world. Even for the one that like, you know what, I'm a designer, I just care about doing amazing things, cool things. I don't want to be a slave of business. I don't want to be a slave of marketing. Even for those, if you want to do great things that people can enjoy, that reach people, you need the business as a gate to get to those people. So even for you, visionary designer, that you want to just do good for the world, you need the business to reach people and do good for the world. It's a tool, right? Correct. It's a platform, it's a tool, it's a gate. What do you think is the most, because you named a lot of characteristics, what do you think is the most undervalued one from the designer's point of view? What do we take for granted? Can you rephrase the question? I just want to make sure you understand. Yeah, I think we as designers do a lot of these things which you just said without actually realizing that we do them. But they create a lot of value for the outside world. What do you see as the most undervalued characteristics? I think it is our ability to deeply understand people, needs and wants. I say that because we give it for granted as a community. It's what we do, of course. But the business community see designers as good graphic people, good industrial design people, good fashion people. You see how our ability is to create beautiful things. They don't understand that those beautiful things, that by the way are also functional, it's all about that amazing balance between functionality and emotion, both in the things we produce, in the service we design, in the experience we create, that perfect balance comes from a deep understanding of human beings. They don't get it. They think that's owned by the consumer insights community, eventually by the marketing community. Well, that's something big that we do. We think we are aware of it because it's part of who we are, but often we forget that other people don't see it in us and we need to remind them that we do that. And that's really an important way for us to create value by understanding people and translating that into meaning. Correct. Absolutely. You know, the list you just mentioned of Characteristic is quite comprehensive. Why don't we find these people? These are like Superman. Yeah, they're really great. I think I'll give you two answers. One is responsibility of the education system, schools and universities to form these kind of people and to remember and understand that a good design thinker, a good innovator is not about just technical skills. They need to nurture this idea of curiosity, this idea of entrepreneurship, this idea of balancing vision with execution. You know, I would love universities that have courses on nurturing this kind of characteristic. They make every single student aware that this is so, so important. I remember, you know, forget even design universities, but schools, primary schools, high schools, I remember when I think back about my schools in Italy, many successful people that I know today at my school were not performing very well. They were not doing good at school. But they were, for instance, the representative of the students in the school. They were organizing amazing parties. They were very entrepreneurial. And so I'm not saying that, you know, you need to do better at school. I was doing very, very well at school and I was also, you know, doing the other thing. So I'm saying that you need both, you need both. But for people that are really good socially, very high EQ and empathy, that are really good organizers and make things happen, schools don't have an ability to reward them. It's not part of the curriculum. I think in the US the situation is a little bit better than in Europe, actually. Yeah, I mean, there is some, you know, the social activities are part of the curriculum. I mean, it's better, but we're not there yet. You know, it's not all the way to bright. But if I remember, the situation in Italy was not that good. So how can we reward that component, but not just reward, train that component? Because once again, I was doing very well at school, but this other part that I learned, I mean, that was part of my DNA, you know, I'm very soft, so very outgoing, I made things happen and everything. But I was totally unaware for many, many years, even after school, that I was so crazy important for my professional journey. I realized later, looking back and looking at how I was behaving, and then I strategize over it. Once you become aware of something, then you can take it to the next level. You can leverage it more and more and more. So let's teach these kids from the beginning, you know, this idea of entrepreneurship and let's reward, nurture it, teach it and reward it. You had the second point, because you said two things and you said the responsibility of the educational system. Where do we find these people and what was the second point? The second part of the answer, the more direct answer is that I don't know. Meaning that they are really difficult to find. Many of these characteristics are not just the ones of the design or the characteristics of the entrepreneur. In fact, in many of my speeches and then in some of the papers I've wrote, I differentiate the characteristics of the designer, the kind of design talents I search from the characteristics of the design thinker or quality innovator, quality the way you want, is the design thinker because there is that component of, you know, the design thinking is the connection between empathy strategy and prototyping that we mentioned earlier. This ability to prototype is typical of the design community. But if you're not a designer, you don't like to be called a design thinker, call it innovation thinking whatever you want. And, you know, some of the characteristics, therefore, are broader than just the pure design community. And therefore, it's not something that you learn at school or you can find in specific kind of communities and that's why it's all about searching those talents through recruiters, through special, you know, personal network and going to conferences and see people talking, looking at amazing work and try to get in touch with those people. And once you meet them, you take them in and then you try to retain them. And then you try to train, you know, especially younger people on that. Some of my most successful people at PepsiCo are actually people that I found when they were really, really young in my past life at 3M, out of schools, extremely talented people. And then we have been nurturing them, we have been training them from within in 3M first and then some of them stayed there and some of them came with me to PepsiCo. So it's part of that, you know, there is also that component. It's when you find them, keep them and multiply them. Multiplying happens automatically, I guess. The last topic really ties into what we are talking about, I think. And it's called New Culture. Do you have a question starter? How can we build a new culture that happened to, in my case, happened to be a design culture, but it could be any new culture within an organization. Well, you know, it's very difficult when you work in an established organization. Think PepsiCo, PepsiCo is 265,000 employees, more than $60 billion of revenue, 20 brands above $1 billion and 40 brands above the $500 million, so it's huge, it's huge. And it's successful. So imagine, you know, to build a new culture an organization like this is not easy at all. There are a variety of different steps that I define already when I was at 3M, but just looking back, you know, I'm a practitioner, but then I look back at what happened, what I did and what I failed, and then I try to extract lessons and build the strategies and theories that then I take with me in my life. So if I think about how to build that new culture, well, first of all, you need to bring in the best talents in that culture. Design world, the most extraordinary design talent, starting with the leader, the people under, and many people probably listening to us right now are thinking, of course, I mean, you're building something new and big, you as a big corporation have a lot of resources to hire, you know, wherever you want, why not? Well, why not is that many of these big organizations, if they have a specific strength, let's say 3M is amazing in R&D, for them it's very easy to attract talents in the area. But it's very difficult to attract talents in an area that is a weakness and they are also afraid that they may not be able to retain them. So it's not just about the ability, you know, eventually with money at the end of the day, you may be able to attract them. But the reality is that even when you attract them, they may last a month, six months. Either be rejected by the organization or leave. So first of all, have the courage to attract the best talents. And this, in this, all the credit goes in PepsiCo, for instance, to Indira Nui, our CEO, and to Brad Jackman that back then, five years ago, was the president of Global Barrage. So these two people decided that the courage to start. Then you need to be protected from the top because any organization will try to protect the status quo and will reject anything new. It's part of, not just of organizations, it's part of our human nature. As people, each of us, we try to protect the status quo. Very few people embrace change because change implies risk and it's difficult and it's not efficient, by the way. So you need the top. It could be the CEO, but it could be also somebody below the CEO, but it could be, it needs to be at the top of the company to protect the new comment. Then you also need a push from the bottom up. If you just have protection from the top and push top down, you go nowhere. And without making any specific names, we saw the failure of designing big corporations in the past 15 years because of this, because it was imposed from the top and then they were not able to take the entire organization with them. So bottom up what it means. From my point of view, it means to identify what I call the co-conspirators inside the organization. So essentially those people that in a way or the other understand what you are trying to do, understand the design cool, help the company changing. They have some form of responsibility. They drive brands or they drive projects and with them you start to build proof points or quick points. Projects where you show the value of design even if they're not perfect because at the beginning it would be very hard to do something perfect. Take some trade-offs, but the necessary trade-offs to get to market with something that's going to be anyway successful and they can show the company concretely and quickly that design or the new culture in general can build value. And this is so powerful because then everybody will try to follow you. And I could go on if you want. I have a question because what you said you reflected on your lessons back in 3M. Let's take a second to reflect on what you already learned at PepsiCo. So, if you got the chance to do it all over again, what would you have done differently of what is the biggest lesson you got from the recent years? In PepsiCo. This is a good question. You know, when I joined, if we talk about building the culture, when I joined, I had the fortune of having tried for 10 years in 3M. Since then I made my mistakes. I made my learning and everything. So, when I joined PepsiCo, I was pretty clear about what moves to do. And so, if I would go back, I would do exactly what we did. And today, we have more than 10 design centers around the world. You know, several hundreds of people. And if I was asking anybody in the company or even myself, five years ago when I joined, do you think you would be where we are today? Five years. I would say probably not. It would take more years. So, I'm pretty happy of how the things went in the past years. So, because time is flying by, but what is the biggest contributor to the fact that you are where you are today? What is the biggest success factor? To single out one thing. Well, to single out one is difficult. But I will try to do it. But let me single out a few and then I will single out one out of the few. It is vision and dreaming on one side. And then ability, understanding that you need to execute and ability to execute is the other. And then taking the company with you is the third. It is very difficult, but then if they don't take the entire organization with them, you go nowhere. And if I need them to single out something out of these three, the quick wins, the proof points I was talking about before. So, if we didn't have amazing projects like SPIRE, this smart font and that has been changing our equipment strategy and has been reinforcing many partnerships with existing customers or the redesign of Pepsi early on four years ago so the full visual identity system the full strategy that for the first time in history connected all the different countries around the world around that strategy. Those two were my first quick wins, my first proof points. Without those, we would have had a very hard time. That's the fundamental. That's the moment you build credibility. Correct. People give you a seat at the table. See, there's a table and resources. That's also important. Very few people were hired from the center in the beginning. With those two people I beat my proof points and then the hundreds of people after were all funded one by one or five at a time, six at a time by the brand owners, but business people and that's powerful because it means you're engaging with them. They're ready to put some money on you and you work with them. There is a big learning that one of the executive vice presidents of 3M, Mr. Monozari gave me many years ago. I went to his office in St. Paul and I was a kid essentially still on my late twenties. Many people in 3M were like oh, we love you, we love what you're doing with design so I was so excited things were moving in the right direction. And they were, they were. But they wanted to move fast and I was believing all these people that were so engaged with me. And Monozari told me something he told me listen, do not believe anybody that tells you that they believe in you and they believe in design because these people do have resources, they do have budgets, they do have money. So until they put the money on the table and they support you financially and they invest in you and so they are together with you to not believe them because they are deciding to do with the money something else that is more of a priority for them than design. And that was for me a huge learning. Today if you don't invest with me, you know I'm talking about money now but it could be also an emotional investment. You know, you need to be with me. If you are not with me with stake in the game then you are not committed. And this is very important because in a passive-aggressive kind of culture that you can find in many of these organizations around the world you need to understand from the beginning right away as fast as possible who is really with you and who is instead pushing back without you even realizing it. Because you may think you are doing progress and then after one year or two you realize that you are not and sometimes it will be too late because you lost your opportunity to show something and you are out. Mauro, I know you didn't prepare this one but is there a question you would like to ask the people who are watching this or listening this episode? Do you have a question for us? Yeah, what is the role? What kind of role do you think designers should play in business in the future? It's somehow connected to the first topic we touched this morning. I see a lot of designers that are frustrated because we don't own innovation because business doesn't understand us because they destroy everything we think of. Are we ready? Are you designers ready to own innovation, to own entrepreneurship, to drive things to market? Innovation is not just about the good idea, the concept. That's invention. Innovation is to transform that good idea is something that goes to marketing and therefore you need to manage all the constraints you have between the good idea and the market. Are we ready as a community to play the role? Are you a designer listening to us ready to do that? What do you think? Leave your thoughts and ideas down below in the comments. Really a good provoking question. I wasn't expecting anything less. Mauro, that was it. We had the time for this in this episode. Thank you for sharing some of the topics that are on your mind today. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. It's been fun. So what do you think? Should designers drive innovation or should we leave that up to others? Share your thoughts and ideas down below in the comments. If you'd like to learn more, check out some of the best episodes or head over to learn.serbsdesignshow.com where you'll find courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics we talk about on the show. So that was it for now. I'll see you in two weeks time with a brand new episode. Thanks for watching and see you then.