Involve me

A cup of coffee for a brilliant idea. Sounds perfect, right?

Van Berlo has come up with this. When I was at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, I saw this stand called ‘Fuel for innovation’.

Special coffee

First I had no idea what it was about, but after a small talk with the lady standing in front of the stand, it all became clear. What is it? In exchange for an idea for one of Van Berlo’s concepts (based on a megatrend like durability), you would get a free cup of coffee. But not just a regular coffee. You will be able to customize your very own cup of coffee with the Promesso coffee machine. You can adjust the strength of your coffee. Had a short night of sleep? Adjust your coffee by lowering the amount of milk, and increasing the amount of coffee beans. This is one of van Berlo’s impressive inventions (designed for Douwe Egberts) which has a lot of potential.

How to be (extra)ordinary

But why is it cool? Well, why isn’t it cool? Van Berlo is a huge company which invents al sorts of products. Products like infant seats, but also products like toilet cleaner. So how cool is it when van Berlo asks ‘normal’ people to think with them to create better products?

When the lady in the stand told me about this concept, I immediately thought of Cool Involvement (phase four from science of the time). The definition of Cool Involvement is ‘We want to (virtually) involve others and we want to be (virtually) involved by others’.

So cool

Fuel for innovation is a great example of Cool Involvement. Van Berlo asks people to share their thoughts on different kind of things (for example durability) and what to do with it. In this way, van Berlo is involved by others, to make even better products. I think it’s very clever. People have all different kinds of opinions and thoughts, which can really matter to a company like van Berlo.

Cool Involvement falls within Experience economy. Experience economy is when people really experience a product or service. Another ‘part’ of Experience economy is Virtual Co-creation.

I think Fuel for innovation is an example of Virtual Co-creation (phase four from science of the time). It’s not certain that van Berlo uses all of the ideas people shared, but there is a chance some ideas will be used. So this is a great example of co-creation. People get a chance to involve van Berlo and possibly help to create a new product thanks to their ideas.

Future

I believe Fuel for innovation is a great example of Experience Economy. People are able to share their thoughts and ideas to help create an even better product. In this way, when the thoughts of consumers are included in the concept, people can later increasingly experience a product or service (which Experience economy is all about).

Sources:

http://vanberlo.nl/press/6

Photo's by Julia Lassche, 2015.

#Experienceeconomy