Design led innovation : shifting from smart follower to digital strategy leader in the Australian airport sector

This paper presents and discusses organisational barriers and opportunities arising from the dissemination of design led innovation within a leading Australian airport corporation. This research is part of a greater action research program which aims to integrate design as a strategic capability through design led innovation within Australian businesses. Findings reveal that there is an opportunity to employ the theoretical framework and tools of design led innovation in practice to build collaborative idea generation by involving customers and stakeholders within the proposal of new to world propositions. The iterative gathering of deep customer insights also provided an opportunity to leverage a greater understanding of stakeholders and customers in strengthening continuing business partnerships through co-design. Challenges to the design led approach include resistance to the exploratory nature of gathering deep customer insights, the testing of long held assumptions and market data, and the disruption of an organisational mindset geared toward risk aversion instilled within the aviation industry. The implication from these findings is that design led innovation can provide the critical platform to allow for a business to grow and sustain internal design capabilities necessary to challenge prevailing assumptions about how its business model operates to deliver value to customers and stakeholders alike. The platform of design led innovation also provides an avenue to support a cultural transformation towards anticipating future needs necessary for establishing a position of leadership within the broader economic environment.

Making sense of purpose, direction and innovation : an embedded design led innovation case study in the Australian mining industry

The mining equipment technology services sector is driven by a reactive and user-centered design approach, with a technological focus on incremental new product development. As Australia moves out of its sustained mining boom, companies need to rethink their strategic position, to become agile to stay relevant in an enigmatic market. This paper reports on the first five months on an embedded case study within an Australian, family-owned mining manufacturer. The first author is currently engaged in a longitudinal design led innovation project, as a catalyst to guide the company’s journey to design integration. The results find that design led innovation could act as a channel for highlighting and exploring company disconnections with the marketplace and offer a customer-centric catalyst for internal change. Data collected for this study is from 12 analysed semistructured interviews, a focus group and a reflective journal, over a five-month period. This paper explores limitations to design integration, and highlights opportunities to explore and leverage entrepreneurial characteristics to stay agile, broaden innovation and future-proof through the next commodity cycle in the mining industry.

Understanding data flow and security requirements in wireless Body Area Networks for healthcare

The Body Area Network (BAN) is an emerging technology that focuses on monitoring physiological data in, on and around the human body. BAN technology permits wearable and implanted sensors to collect vital data about the human body and transmit it to other nodes via low-energy communication. In this paper, we investigate interactions in terms of data flows between parties involved in BANs under four different scenarios targeting outdoor and indoor medical environments: hospital, home, emergency and open areas. Based on these scenarios, we identify data flow requirements between BAN elements such as sensors and control units (CUs) and parties involved in BANs such as the patient, doctors, nurses and relatives. Identified requirements are used to generate BAN data flow models. Petri Nets (PNs) are used as the formal modelling language. We check the validity of the models and compare them with the existing related work. Finally, using the models, we identify communication and security requirements based on the most common active and passive attack scenarios.