Leveraging design in policymaking

World Economic Forum

When the World Economic Forum reached out to Designit, they were looking for a partner to facilitate a co-creation session during their initiative: Accelerating the Impact of IoT Technologies. After further understanding the real need of creating public policies targeted to help small Latin American businesses progress by adopt IoT technologies, we proposed a more in-depth research approach to discover the obstacles currently faced.

This research approach had specific requirements given the project timeline and the creative sessions that had already been scheduled with the participation of different business owners, agencies, and government stakeholders. The new challenge became
designing and moderating large-scale research workshops to understand pain points, and opportunities for industrial small and medium companies (SMEs) in the usage of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Understanding the problem

During the research phase, we allowed business owners and employees to voice their concerns, and discovered SMEs struggle big time when implementing IIoT for reasons beyond policymaking. Problems like resource allocation, dealing with day-to-day operations or finding the right talent where not issues previously considered by the WEF team whose purpose was focused mainly on policy making.

In the end, the team that begun the project believing companies would embrace the idea of adopting technologies today in order to become ‘more productive in the long run’, discovered that implementing new technology, leveraging innovation, or forecasting uses of the potential data collected were not priorities for companies with no capacity to hire the right personnel in the first place.

Given this scenario, we began challenging wether the issue was how might we engage employees and managers in industry 4.0 (very much related to IIoT)… or if we should consider a more specific approach like how might we train people in industry 4.0 without lowering productivity?

We clustered findings in general topics like: Organizational culture, Funding and support, Leadership, Business Strategy, People and capabilities and Tech readiness, among others. Each of these clusters gathered different topics that could potentially relate to a policy surrounding the main idea.

For example, a cluster like Organizational culture had a specific section about Innovation mindset and here you could find opportunities or pain points like the fact that the majority of the companies are consumed by daily activities which do not let them push new initiatives or even invest time in thinking about better ways to do things.

Co-creating the solution

Once we had mapped all the opportunity areas, we schedule a new workshop session to co-create with business and government institutions working together to come up with ideas.

We flew back to Sao Paulo to meet with the team and by then we had learned best practices to host this large scale workshops. We had analyzed findings and we brought to the table specific challenges that small businesses considered major issues and we gave them the creative tools to start ideating solutions.

Each team worked with a policy canvas to address a challenge and define a solution. For example, one team was given the challenge of: How might we work collaboratively and deal with industrial exposure, competitive advantages and confidentiality issues?

Their idea mapped creating a knowledge sharing platform with a self-service technological assessment, learning sessions, and potential funding, to share interesting learnings, and content based on companies technological maturity level.

The perfect biproduct

Design-driven policy toolkit

During the process of interacting with WEF, we documented every interaction and learning in a walk-through manual or tool kit that could eventually help other organizations design and execute workshop sessions to develop human-centric public policies all around the world.

Current status

By 2020, ten SMEs from the automotive and aeronautic sectors were selected to implement IIoT technologies with technical and financial support from the government, academia, consulting firms like Deloitte, and the World Economic Forum.

Throughout the process, several insights and public policy ideas were generated to accelerate the adoption of 4.0 technologies in industrial SMEs.

Information about the project can be found in the youtube channel of ne of the organizations involved: IPT - Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas.

Project collaborators: Raphael Alex de Sousa, Andrés Velez.