At FIM, we have a particular working philosophy that guides our thinking and doing: we believe that we cannot know what the future holds; we use extrapolations from the status quo and detailed planning with caution and as an exemption only; and most of the time we challenge the status quo, strive to reinvent it, and also question our own view of the world. We do so by going out into the world (of Aesculap and our customers), observing and modeling people’s behavior, and then trying to find ways to improve their actions via experimentation. So, when you work with us, we need you to be open to several principles, some of which are delineated below, that might sometimes feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable. One of these is reflected in this site itself: “We build in public” and refine our content while working with you. This follows the motto, “If you are not embarrassed about your first version, you’ve launched too late.”
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Instead of discussing back and forth endlessly in the team or other inbred circles of our organization, we will, from now on, gather early, often, and continuously feedback from our customers and users. This way, we can avoid exchanging mere opinions, speculations, and assumptions. At best, this will help us to move towards establishing an evidence-informed way of working in the whole organization, not just in Business R&D where this is going to be mandatory.
Oh, and this also means: It is not enough to casually talk to the customer at the beginning or end of some development cycle and call this a »Fast-Customer-Loop«. It rather means developing Continuous Discovery discovery habits and experimentation with customers in each development sprint or cycle that touches customer-facing aspects.
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We need to get away from management speak, fluff, and weasel words. Instead of beating each other the same old commonplaces as “Higher Efficiency” or “Patient Safety” in meetings and PPT boxes over our heads, we will develop our skills in visualization, mapping, and low-fi prototyping.
Visualization and mapping we will use for bringing across research and experimentation insights. That means we will build “models of reality”, for example of user study outcomes, how as-is and to-be systems and processes work, or any other topic that benefits from a good self-explanation beyond fluffy words.
Fast low-fi prototyping and pretotyping we will use to make ourselves understandable to both colleagues and customers by putting design artifacts in their hands that they can touch and experience instead of having to watch and listen to our PPT »pitches« passively.
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Today, many of our innovation endeavors and teams suffer from an extreme fixation on a predefined and narrow solution space. Internal stakeholders often impose this, which leads to myopic micro-optimizations and the ignoring of way more promising opportunities along the way. So, instead of jumping right into solution mode, wouldn’t we all benefit from understanding our customers’ problems better first?
This is why we’ll strive to understand and visually describe problem spaces before we go into solution mode. “Go broad to go narrow” is our motto here. Mastering agile working approaches like Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Scrum, to name but a few, will help us here.
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In the past we often took decisions like this: #oldway. This led to all kinds of problems, from X to Y and Z. This is why we will move away from (pretend to) know-it-all leadership decisions towards a deliberate push of decision-making at the team level. The only »caveat« good news is, that this makes teams fully accountable for most of their decisions. Only when major funding milestone decisions are pending that need leadership support and more budget, will the teams have to convince their board with evidence that justifies further support and investment. The necessary confidence for doing so results from living the working principles above.
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Even today, we often think in and over-focus on our singular, to-be-optimized product only. Such a myopic focus, which frequently even leaves out digitalization or servitization potential, is something we cannot afford anymore. The future present is digital. Telecom providers fear becoming “dumb pipes,” medical producers fear becoming “pill mills,” and the retail industry fears its “showrooming.” So, what about us? Are we on the verge of becoming “metal benders”? No, we shall not.
This is why each new product generation, especially each new-to-the-world product development, must be thought of and built as a puzzle or center piece that integrates into our broader digital Aesculap ecosystem. We will build digital-as-standard solutions that integrate seamlessly into our customers' value chains and are larger than mere stand-alone metal products.
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FEI Explore - Working Principles (Word File)
https://bbraun.sharepoint.com/:w:/r/sites/bbraun_collab_innovationmanagement-aesculapcodifysite/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={1E95297E-5239-4690-AB2D-9B1D7AB0CD21}&file=FEI Explore - Working Principles.docx&action=default&mobileredirect=true
We also follow certain principles in team work that are more akin to general agile ways of working (which is a prerequisite to any innovation work). These of course are important too — especially in your team work.