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Global Service Jam Antwerp 2012
On the 24th of February, 2012, people interested in service and customer experience will meet at locations all over the globe. They will be designers, students, academics, business people, and customers. On Friday 6.00 PM the global theme will be presented. In a spirit of experimentation, innovation, co-creation and friendly competition, teams will have less than 48 hours to develop and prototype completely new services inspired by a shared theme. At the end of the weekend, their collection of brand new services will be published to the world.
Join us at the Global Service Jam 2012 here
Register Here
Organizational Change Practitioners
On the 26th of january, Bert Van Bergen gave an inspiring keynote organizational change at the first Organizational Change Practitioners meeting, where Bert linked co-production of services with a changed perspective on Change Management. Over the past years this practitioners group has been growing to more than 22.000 members, so it was time for us to meet up. The theme of this meeting was ‘Change Management best practices in projects’. Thank you kindly, Mr. Luc Galoppin for the invitation an setting up this wonderful event! More info and a full review can be found here
Service Design at Toerisme Vlaanderen
On the 12th of December Toerisme Vlaanderen challenged us to inspire their guests on service design and customer experience. The fact that customer experience is one of the most important things in tourism is no surprise but trying to be innovative in this field is harder then people might think. Kite showed how Service Design and a human-centred approach can lead to new ideas during a workshop at #toeristvanmorgen en a keynote given by Jürgen Tanghe.
Antwerp Sustainability Jam
Upcoming 28th till 30th of October Kite will host the Antwerp chapter of the Global Sustainability Jam at Stuurboord, the event location situated in the same place as our offfice. The aim of this ‘jam’ is to come up with a feasible concept to make the world a more sustainable place.
Kite will use its inhouse developed toolset to guide all participants through the various developmentstages to work out their concept (a product, a service, a community platform, a new tree, an alternative work method, … or anything else enhancing global sustainability). Teams from over 50 cities in the world will come together on that last weekend of October to create new concepts based on a theme that will remain a secret until the jam kicks-off. Feel free to check out www.antwerpsustainabilityjam.be to subscribe !
Touchpoint article
Kite features in the current issue of Touchpoint focusses on service design and organisational change. How can service design contribute to change within organisations? Find out how service designers meet this challenge and how companies benefit from the service design approach. In this issue of Touchpoint you will find articles and case studies related to organisational change in different industries, as well as service design news, interviews with service design professionals and a collection of tools and methods. For more information about Touchpoint 3#2 have a look at the table of contents and order your copy now!
Service Design Conference - San Fransisco
Kite is happy to announce that Jürgen Tanghe will be holding a lecture at the 4th annual Service Design Conference in San Francisco on the 20th and 21st October 2011. There we will meet to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the business, science and practice of the innovation and improvement of services.
In his presentation, "Inside the mind of the finance guy", Jürgen will demonstrate how very common practices as finance, risk and quality management and ‘good’ management decisions provide barriers to the implementation of service designs.
Kmo-portefeuille
Kite proudly announces to be a certified service provider of the ' KMO-portefeuille, a system by which Flemish SMEs and professionals can get financial support for specific projects within their organization.
The SME portfolio is the successor to the earlier Flemish 'BEA measure "and the previous training and advice checks. Working with a certified service provider like Kite gives SME's the possibility to get 50% of consulting projects subsidized.
More info can be found on www.kmo-portefeuille.be
Qfor quality label
Kite achieved the Qfor Quality Label for training and consulting services. Thanks to the European Qfor-method, businesses will have at their disposal a dependable method for quality control of Training Institutes and Consultancy firms. For Service Providers, like Kite Consultants, the Qfor-method is a perfect tool for proving their professionalism.
In the Qfor Model, twenty five indicators are defined as most influencing the Quality and the Results of the activities of Training Institutes and Consultancy Firms. The Criteria and the Subcriteria (Indicators) for achieving the Qfor Quality Label are split up in four categories: Execution of Projects, Human Resources, Resources and Organisation.
An independent audit thoroughly evaluated Kite based on these criteria. Shortly after, Kite achieved a positive score on all criteria and sub criteria which granted them the quality label.
Trends and Kite
On April 21st 2011, Jürgen Tanghe, Managing Director at Kite Consultants, elaborated on Service Innovation in the business magazine "Trends". He explains why innovation and design is not only for product environments en describes some of the most common roadblocks in service design. He concludes that management needs to change their perspective and should consider a service delivery process as a chain of interactions and experiences.
De Standaard on Kite
On the 29th of march 2011, Danny Lievens, Managing Director at Kite Consultants, gave an interview in the newspaper ‘De Standaard’ on change management. In this interview he elaborated the Kite vision on change management, in which the human factor and behaviour is put forward, and aligned with organizational changes.
GSJ Antwerp
In the weekend of 11-13 March 2011, Kite Consultants was the proud host of the Global Service Jam Antwerp. During this Global Service Jam, 50 teams in different cities all over the world, designed brand new services in just 48 hours, with a diverse group of colleagues, friends, complete strangers, and most of all: passionate creatives. Antwerp was one of the main cities to host the jam, next to Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Istanbul, Cape Town, Sao Paulo, Valencia, Berlin, London, Glasgow, Scotland, Toronto and Calgary, New York and San Francisco. With about 40 people, 8 new service designs were developed, through a lot of work, sweat, post-its, discussion and fun.
Next to hosting the jam, Kite guided the participants through the design process by offering its tools, knowledge and people. Our service design tools were partially redesigned to be workeable with big groups, and experienced coaches brought structure into the design process. The groups headed off by defining their scope and sector. Hereafter, they identified the needs, wishes, current way of working of the chosen topic. For example, a group working on ethical products, went to supermarkets, customers, companies, and asked them what they thought was important, what kind of information they needed,… In a later stadium, the groups concretized their ideas by desk-research, visualisation, and conceptualisation of the business plan, and presented them on the last day of the jam. Furthermore, several speakers with different backgrounds were invited to give short seminars on service design.
The weekend was a big success, as well for the participants as for Kite, as almost all participants emphasized that they really enjoyed the whole design-process, and for Kite it was an exciting experience to guide a big group successfully through a design-process, resulting in interesting design-propositons. Kite is currently developing one of the design-propositions, and we’re very excited about it.
For more information:
Positive Change
On September 4th 2010, Jürgen & Danny where asked for their vision on change. Their statement: Change should be embedded in a positive vibe.