Activating innovation culture

Design Factories around the globe have a multitude of different flavours; their purpose and portfolio of activities influenced by the vision and strategy of their home institution. What unites us is a shared, core set of values that shape attitude and culture for innovation, emerging from Aalto Design Factory. Our innovation culture and value system is expressed in many ways, to communicate with different internal and external stakeholders; students, staff, researchers and industry as they visit or become part of the community. For example, guiding principles explicitly signal values that may inform people’s behaviour: ‘your parents don’t work here’, ‘talk to strangers’, ‘safety comes first’, ‘all people have potential’, and ‘fail fast to succeed sooner’ or ‘all you need is love, design, business and engineering’. However, facilitating people to translate innovation culture and values into action can be challenging, as the nature of this knowledge is more tacit than explicit. Innovation culture is concerned with mindset and conditions for applying more concrete design inspired innovation tools and processes (UK Design Council, 2019). How can we activate, demonstrate and support the conditions for innovation as part of learning programs that foster capability in interdisciplinary collaboration and design-inspired innovation? And how do we do this in a world where virtual operations and distributed teams have become a normalised part of most workplaces?

keywords: innovation culture; learning environments; innovation mindset; digital space activation; physical space

• with: Christine Thong (lead), Anita Kocsis, Pauliina Mattila, Aaron Down, David Mesa, Angela Pye, Amelia Iverson, Stefan Lodewyckx, Tim Boyle, Carrol Azzam-Mackay, Margi Moore, Adrian Bigham, Elna Flourie
• year: May 2022 – October 2022
• for: dfgn.r conference