"People tend to see commercial and non-profit companies at opposite ends of the spectrum. But I feel that the combination is the right way forward. It would help the nonprofit a lot if it took inspiration from the companies. And vice versa. Even the business model can be built to have a societal overlap."
Jindřich Fialka | CEO @ Q Designers
Something's not going the way it should. Either you're flying, but still low. But it's pulling you further and further. And you just can't seem to get any altitude. Or you've been sitting on the ground for a long time, your wings broken by the attack of a predator that's still lurking in the nearest tree, about to have its way with you.
These are the two most common moments when clients turn to innovative designers for help. Asking for a new flight plan or sharpening their claws for that battle with the aforementioned predatory competition.
It sounded familiar, I've had the same experience. So it was nice to see a similar issue through someone else's eyes. And through the prism of other customers. That's why I invited the head of one of only three innovative design studios in the Czech Republic, Jindřich Fialka, CEO of Q Designers.
We tried to squeeze answers out of him to the following questions...
🔸 How do I know a great design?
🔸 How to build Product 2.0?
🔸 How long will the whole innovation take and when will I see the first results?
🔸 When does it not make sense to improve the product?
🔸 How do commercial and non-commercial projects differ?
HOW INNOVATIVE DESIGN INCREASES MARKET SHARE (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. If you've heard some Zážeh, liked something, took something away from it, then subscribe to help us both. You won't miss any more episodes, and you'll help me navigate the social media algorithms so well that I can invite even more great guests like today's. Today's guest is Henry Fialka, CEO and Chief Designer of Q Designers. Hello.
Jindřich Fialka
Hi, thanks for inviting me.
What is great design?
Martin Hurych
What is good design? I was looking at that term interspersed with the preparation we exchanged, your blog, your company website, and it caught my eye so much that I thought it must be the opener.
Jindřich Fialka
Good design is how you have to prepare for guests on this podcast. Good design always combines form and function. Function is what you need to solve, what you need to arrange, and form is how you do it. Good design in a house is when it fulfills the expected function of you as the owner. If you have 4 kids, your house will look different than a person living alone or maybe just a couple. Good design always depends on the expectations of that user or target group, and then you judge whether the form you are trying to fulfill matches that or not. You, when you sent me the questionnaire before this interview, it was much longer and more extensive than I expected, which is great. Because you guys have a lot of topics to choose from now within the interview, but at the same time it gave me the opportunity to think about those things a little bit ahead of time. It might reflect on the quality of the interview itself that it's not completely unprepared, but I might already have something in my head beforehand. If you hadn't done that, we'd both be sucking on the finger here, which would be a worse design for the interview.
How do I know a great design?
Martin Hurych
As an amateur, how do I have a chance to know a good design before I use it?
Jindřich Fialka
I have a simple tool for that. We do innovative product design, service design, UX, CX, all these things no matter what the form. The way you know good design is when you meet something and you think, that's so brilliantly simple, you didn't invent it yourself.
Who are Q Designers?
Martin Hurych
Before we dig deeper into this, it would be fair to introduce the company, how you got into it, so that we understand the perspective from which we will describe these things here. So what does Q Designers do?
Jindřich Fialka
Q Designers is an innovation studio I founded about 8 years ago to build innovations that have a positive impact on people and the world. Innovations can be products, services, it can be a new company, brand, it can be an event, the form that the innovation takes is just based on the function it is meant to fulfill. We start by solving a problem, like people don't understand something or something is not selling well or there is no product on the market that solves x. Then we build that form, that solution, and that solution can be a new service, a new product, a new business. We recently started a non-profit because that was the best solution to the problem. Q Designers as an innovation studio takes things from a problem or an idea on paper to a working product, service or business in the marketplace. We do the whole process, research, rapid prototyping, testing, scaling, product-market fit, business model. It's all the things you need to get from an idea or a problem to happy customers or users.
What does Jindra enjoy about innovative design?
Martin Hurych
What are you so passionate about innovative design that you decided to dedicate your life to it and start a company?
Jindřich Fialka
That would be more than one thing, but the first thing that comes to mind is that there's an opportunity to pick a problem that you want to solve and then actually solve it. It's challenging, it takes a long time, you have to do a lot of work on it, but it gives you a great deal of freedom in that you can say this year you want to help something in education or health care or future housing. The innovation studio has the teams and the process to do it, they know how to do it, and you can get on with it and if you don't screw it up and you really dig it, you have a chance at the end of the year to have a working solution to part of the problem.
Of course, one innovative studio will not solve the future of housing in the Czech Republic, but it can contribute to it.
How do they get projects?
Martin Hurych
Do I understand correctly that you choose the projects you go into?
Jindřich Fialka
The topic can come to us from the outside, an innovation studio like ours usually works with bigger companies, we work a lot with Skanska, with Sporka, with IKEOU and they solve their topics. IKEA typically deals with topics related to housing and sustainability, Skanska also deals with housing and Spořka deals with finance. Spořka, for example, needs to make sure that people start taking care of their financial health. You are a bank, how can you help? There are many potential answers to this question. They then get back to us and say how they can get financial health into their products or how to build a product that will strengthen people's financial health. What is it going to be, how is it going to be sold, how much is it going to cost, who is it going to be for, what is it going to be called? You have to address all of these things. That's the situation when it comes from the outside, that someone asks us to solve a problem. But it can also be the other way around. We decide that this year we're going to do education or something, or a problem comes to us and we say this is the problem we want to solve.
Martin Hurych
So am I correct in understanding that the innovation designer handles everything from the initial idea or requirements to the final business model, including pricing?
Jindřich Fialka
It's true.
How to think about designing a product or service?
Martin Hurych
One thing that fascinates me about this, and we've already outlined it lightly here before we turned on the cameras and the footage. I've pretty much never understood how an innovative designer can design a diakonia one day and a very capitalistic business model for IKEU the next. Let's dig into that a little bit, because I suspect there's a process that needs to be followed. Let's break it down for those who might want to launch something new next year and don't know how to even begin to think about it.
Jindřich Fialka
Here, it might be nice to mention the different mindsets you can use when looking at design. There are 4 variations, 4 levels of design perception. They did a huge amount of research on this about 20 years ago in several countries, it started in Denmark, but gradually it grew to other countries and it became what is now called the Danish Design Ladder, the Danish Design Ladder. This scale has 4 steps, 0, 1, 2, 3, and your company is somewhere on that scale. Either you're at level 0, which means I don't care about design, I don't care about d e s i g n , it's completely out of my hands, I don't care. Level 1 is design as a form, meaning when you say design, to me it means how things look. That's nice lights, nice cars, modern computers that have a specific design. Then those are the companies that commission graphic design studios to make their website prettier. Then there's the next level and that's design as a process. This is where I realize that when I create something new, a new product, a new service, that it has some steps.
It starts with research, then you design concepts of how it could work, what it could look like, then you do some user testing, you gather feedback through that, and then you actually build it. This process is repeated until it's done. The last level of design perception is design as strategy. That is, you think about your entire business model in this way. When I draw the business model for our innovation studio, which I do once or twice a year because it changes and evolves a little bit, I write up what version of that business model it is. Now we're somewhere on innovation studio 4.1. We've tested our business model a couple of times, something worked, something didn't work, so we've changed it, tweaked it, added new products, took away something that didn't work, and that's how we iterate it over time.
Martin Hurych
For a service company, should I think of it as a customer journey, where do I take the client from where?
Jindřich Fialka
That would be the optics of a particular product, because your particular product has a customer journey. It has a target audience, that is, who it's for, what problem it solves, how you get that person there, what steps they have to take, so through the lens of one product, it's a customer journey. Your whole business is likely to have multiple products, ergo multiple customer journeys, multiple target audiences. You have to prioritize between them, they have different financial outcomes and we're already at design as a strategy.
Martin Hurych
Now I've positioned myself as a business owner somewhere in these dots. What's next? Let's say I have an ambition to lead the company out of some slightly murky red ocean waters. I want to make the company more memorable for the customer, I want to get rid of the competition, or I want to improve my
market position. I have the desire to do something with the company, to make it more modern and I'm thinking about modernizing my business model.
Jindřich Fialka
Our experience is that when companies, small, medium, large, it doesn't really matter, contact us, there are two situations. Either I want to innovate, I want something new because I want to strengthen my position on the market, I see some international trends that I want to adapt to or jump on. That's innovation in order to strengthen my business model. The other option is that I have to innovate because I missed something, my competitors have overtaken me, I don't have the product they have, or the regulator has caught up with me and suddenly the way it has worked up to now can no longer work, I have to adapt somehow. So either you innovate because you have that freedom, you have that opportunity to shift the business model somehow and you want to, or you have to innovate because otherwise your business is going to go down the drain.
Martin Hurych
In terms of the process that I'm interested in and that we want to talk about, is there any difference?
Jindřich Fialka
No, the process is the same. At that point, the company comes to us with an assignment, and that assignment should ideally be a definition of the problem. We've stopped selling this product and we don't know why, or we have to change this product that's worked for us for 10 years. Now I take a specific example from a bank, the regulation has changed, a product that we have been selling for 10 years and we have 2 million users there, we have to change the terms and conditions because the CNB requires us to do so. The moment we adjust those terms, those 2 million users will very likely become maybe 200,000 users because we want them to re-sign the contract for that product and that will very likely have a very high dropout rate. How do we do that so that we don't lose them? That's a great assignment because that's the definition of the problem and it opens up different opportunities to solve the problem.
How to build Product 2.0?
Martin Hurych
So let's go this way, something is no longer selling, I need to make it a 2.0 product.
Jindřich Fialka
That's great, that's the most common case we deal with in reality. We already have a separate process for this internally called refresh. I have a product or a service or a business and I know it has extra, I believe it has extra, but for whatever reason it's not meeting KPIs or my expectations or I just feel like it's fundamentally slowing down or it didn't even kick off right the first time. The brief came from the top, we built it, we sent it to market and it's sort of working, but everybody would like it to be much better. It's not so bad that we outright bricked it, but at the same time, it's nowhere near meeting our expectations.
The ideal scenario is a refresh, let's look at it from the outside, objectively. That's very much the added value of an innovation studio, because then you have a team from the outside looking in with fresh eyes and also having the experience of building a business model. So they are not only looking at it through the lens of, say, the bank. Last year, we did something with a developer and we also do things in education, so we understand a lot about customer journeys and how to make it so that people are ready to make a decision and buy something at the end of the day. We analyze that business model as a whole, find the weakest spots, design specific solutions to the problems that are there, and test them in practice. Then we decide whether the business model is worth tweaking or whether it needs to be changed entirely.
Martin Hurych
Do I understand correctly that if I ask an innovation studio, they would default to design as strategy?
Jindřich Fialka
We will always think of it that way, and that is also one of the challenges of working with the Innovation Studio. People usually don't have that experience, they haven't worked with an innovation studio. We are 3 here in the Czech market, so it's not that common, but in any case the collaboration is usually broader and more complex than people initially imagine. The idea is, make us a new website and our question is why do they need a new website. They don't get enough people signing up, they need to recruit 100 people a month and 20 people are signing up, why are only 20 people signing up, as it was a year ago, 100 people were signing up a year ago? A hundred applied a year ago and now they're not applying. What's changed since then? Until we get to a definition of the problem, there's no point in proposing a solution. Because in the end, it will very likely turn out that the solution to the problem is not a new website at all, but in fact they need to work on their communications strategy or other channels through which they go to those people. But you can start anywhere. If you have a responsible, experienced designer on the other side of the table, they'll do that problem definition with you.
Martin Hurych
I know where I am on the Danish ladder scale, I know roughly what I want, I want a refresh of a service or product. Now you come in and so the first thing is that we get a good definition of what the problem really is and what the outcome is likely to be. What's next?
Jindřich Fialka
I will summarize the whole process and then we can go into a little more detail. The process, in simple terms, is that in the first meeting we talk to you about why you need to address this, what you need to address, where the root causes of the problem are. Then we'll prepare a project proposal and look at how long it's going to take, what's going to come out of it, how many people are going to have to work on it, how much it's going to cost, what are the expected deliverables. We should fine tune that together to make sure it's heading in the right direction, that you end up getting what you need.
If we reward that, we're going to refresh that product or service or business model. This can take anywhere from 3 to 9 months, depending on how complex it is, and it always starts with a joint workshop. We have a kick-off workshop where our team meets with your team and we do the assignment together. What are the expectations, what are the biggest risks, what research have you already done, what data do you have to do so that we don't re-do research that you've already done, who's going to work on it from you, what's their time commitment, who's going to work on it from us?
Then it's kicked off together and the process has 4 phases, research, ideation, prototyping and then proof of concept. The research is such that we need to find out 3 things mostly. It's interviewing users of that product, who is your customer, who is your user. There's interviews with you inside the company, who has experience with it, who's done it before, how did it work. Then we're always looking at trends, who else in the world is doing something similar and we can take inspiration from there. It's always internal research, external research and trend research. Then there's ideation. We have a definition of the problem, we already have a lot of inspiration from the research and we can pitch some solutions. So we throw 10, 20, 30 solution options that might help solve it, but we don't know which ones are going to be right, which ones are going to work, they're just ideas. The next phase then is testing, we build different variants of prototypes through which we test it realistically with users, with customers and we throw out the things that don't work and glue together the things that do work. Very often, out of those 20, 30 concepts, one or two survive, but it's that combination of all the best ideas that have been put out there over time.
Ultimately it's proof of concept, proof of traction, let's try to sell it for real. If we're building a new product or service or event or whatever, the proof that it works, that we've done it right, is that we sell it to 50 people, 100 people, 30 people depending on how the business model is built.
How is it possible to cover so many competences?
Martin Hurych
I'm going to stop here because it's on my mind. As an innovation studio, how is it possible to have competence in building a new revolutionary bike on the one hand and designing some social care or recycling furniture on the other?
Jindřich Fialka
I'm not saying that we know everything about all topics, we are not Beetle Baggers and there are some things where we send people to someone else at the beginning. We do get the occasional enquiry from someone with an architectural background asking if we can design their shop interior, which usually doesn't make sense for us to do. So I just send it straight to a friend who has a studio to do it. But otherwise, the answer is that it's the same process behind it all. We're always doing research, concepts, testing, proof of concept and repeating it over and over until the business model works. People in our business have done it x number of times and whether it's a banking product or a furniture recycling service doesn't play that much of a role. It always has a target audience, they have a problem, you design a solution to that problem, you need to hit the product-market fit. Your solution has to be on terms that are affordable for them, but it also has to be financially sustainable in the long term. Then you address some technological feasibility, how it's going to be sold, how it's going to be manufactured, how the company is going to implement it.
Martin Hurych
I understand it in the case of services, because there I can somehow market and sell it and explain what it will look like when it gets going. What I don't get my head around, and my bubble is that I have to touch a lot of things, how about tangible things?
Jindřich Fialka
We don't do that many historically, we do maybe one a year. Now we just finished one and the process is the same, only the question of implementation is different. When you build an app, a service, a digital product, then the implementation usually means that you have to code something and then some customers, users use it. There's an interesting difference in that you can edit it on the fly, so if you accidentally have a bug in there, you edit it in a day and upload a new version the next day. The impact of those digital products is multiplied by the number of users.
With physical products it's different because there you design a product, build a prototype 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 and debug 3 things. You debug it as the person uses it. When you're designing a chair, you need it to sit well, you need it to be stackable, you need it to be easy to transport by truck, you need it to be made of materials that are certified and available for the next 10 years. You need to guarantee its availability. At one point you have to do something called design freeze and say this is the version we're putting into production, then somebody makes 10,000 of them and you can't fix any more mistakes. The testing and prototyping and production preparation for those things looks very different than the digital ones where you can afford much faster iterations. Because the mistake you make is potentially much less costly, but otherwise the process is exactly the same.
Where are the research bottlenecks?
Martin Hurych
Taking the 4 phases we've talked about, I suppose the most challenging is probably the research, figuring out what to do in the first place. Where are there usually some surprises hidden within this phase?
Jindřich Fialka
You're already going into this with a good assumption that research is the most important thing. A lot of companies feel that the research is not the most important thing, that the most important thing is then the implementation, so that it can be produced with our technology or, more importantly, so that it meets this ISO standard. That discussion is sometimes difficult because there is no point in addressing the difficulty of implementation when you don't know what you are actually going to build. It's important not to underestimate the research at the beginning, and companies often tend to skip it. They've been doing it for 20 years and they know their customers, so they know what they need. We tend to try not to be confrontational in that discussion, and at the same time, just the fact that we're having that discussion means that they realise that they're probably not going to figure it out on their own. So research is important, because if you frame the problem right at the beginning, then you're coming up with a solution in the right direction. If you frame the problem wrong, then you come up with 30 solutions, but they all lead in the wrong direction.
How long will the whole innovation take and when will I see the first results?
Martin Hurych
We've moved beyond research, you said 3 to 9 months in some digital or service projects. Out of that 3 to 9 months, how much of that research should I keep, how long from the beginning will I be able to see anything as a business owner pouring money into it?
Jindřich Fialka
Now. In fact, we are already in the process of researching together how it is done abroad and looking for the strengths in order to clarify which direction to take. The goal of this whole process is to get from the idea phase to the phase of actually testing something as soon as possible and it can be done in maybe a week. That's not to say that all the research is done in a week, research usually takes 1 to 2 months. One month is usually for blood and only if you've done it three times before and know exactly how to do what.
Safer is the two months and then one month for concepts, another month for testing and in 4, 5 months you can have real results from the market. But if it's complex, hiding some other subsets of products and services underneath, it takes that 9 months.
When does it not make sense to improve the product?
Martin Hurych
How often do you get told that refresh is not possible and you need to go deeper?
Jindřich Fialka
Refresh is probably always possible, just sometimes it's not worth it. The product could be improved, but the time and money you burn by improving it will lead to an improvement of maybe 10, 20%. That's not a good argument for doing it.
Martin Hurych
How often does this happen to you? How often do you let a customer down that this way is wrong?
Jindřich Fialka
I think it happened once this year. But that wasn't a refresh, that was designing a new product from scratch. They had a vision, they wanted to build it, and our response was that there was no point in building it, it was pointless, and we had our arguments for it. That problem could have been solved much easier, for much less money, much easier than building a whole new application because of it. That happens to us far more often than it doesn't make sense to do a refresh.
What to have ready before the innovation process?
Martin Hurych
As a business owner or a responsible person who has to enter into communication with you, what should I have prepared before we even start talking?
Jindřich Fialka
You don't have to have anything ready. When you asked about how long the process takes, the 9 months is for the whole process from zero to a finished business model or product. If we're still talking about the refresh, that can be done in 3 months. So if you already have a foundation, you have some data, you have some customers, we can work with them that we don't have to hunt from scratch, then a refresh of a product from the version you have today to a version that works significantly better can be done in 3 months.
You don't have to have anything prepared from the start, we ask you the things we need to know and then we go through the process with you. Because of course we don't pick up your 20 years of experience in the business in 3 months, that's not even our role. We are supposed to bring that objective view from the outside and our advantage is that we have those processes very well set up internally. So we can quickly understand the problem, quickly design a solution, quickly build prototypes and test and change them extremely quickly and then ultimately tell you what works best. Doing it in-house is usually extremely difficult because companies don't have the people to do it and if they have people, they're working on 3 other projects and they don't have the time to dedicate to it and they don't have the experience.
Why are innovative designers not billionaires?
Martin Hurych
Let me ask you a devil's advocate question. If you know the recipe for improving anything, why isn't every innovative designer a billionaire?
Jindřich Fialka
Some are, and I feel that innovation studios tend to end up building their own product anyway, and then it either succeeds or fails. So you end up with an internal startup anyway, like what happened to us, and you move from being an innovation designer to being an investor. Then you pick the topics and products you want to invest in, you know how to build them, and you know how to scale them.
The other important answer to this question is that some things cannot be built without an existing infrastructure or brand. I'll give you an example, Second Life Furniture, which we built with IKEA. IKEA came in 7 years ago saying they needed to solve a problem, a great brief. People think IKEA furniture doesn't last, which is not true, for example IKEA for Business furniture has a 10 year warranty and they also have some 2030 sustainability strategy that says their products have to be sustainable. So how could they do that to show people that IKEA furniture lasts a lot longer than they think it does and at the same time reduce their ecological footprint? Based on that, we did research, we tested things and the Second Life of Furniture was born, which we piloted here in Prague at Zličín and is now working in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
It's a service that allows you to sell your furniture to IKEY when you move house or when your children grow up. You send in a photo, IKEA will offer you what they'll buy it from you for, give you the money, you get rid of the furniture and they sell it in the discount corner to the new owner and give them a year's warranty on it. We've had pieces of furniture like that that have gone through that Second Life maybe three times, so we have a dresser that somebody bought, then sold it, it went into Second Life, then somebody bought it again, moved again, and sold it. You track it through those product codes, so you know how many times it's been through.
You can try to build this as a startup, start it yourself, but good luck with that. You don't have the IKEA store network that you can use to reach all their IKEA for Business or all their IKEA Family customers. They have a quality guarantee, they have these places where they can actually rotate the furniture, they'll bring it to the store or IKEA will bring it. We still use the IKEA shuttle service because when they send an IKEA car with, for example, a new kitchen to a customer, the car comes back empty. We've linked it to Second Life, so when the car comes back, it can pick up the furniture from Second Life and bring it to IKEA, so you don't even have to drive it there. These are things that are terribly hard to build from scratch and for some business models it doesn't even make sense. If you have a chain of IKEA stores, that business The model is great, but unless you have a network of IKEA stores, it doesn't make sense to build it separately.
When does an innovation studio product fail?
Martin Hurych
One thing that was said there was that as an innovation studio I will build a startup, I will have my own product that will succeed or fail. What's the way to make an innovation studio product fail? If we take the fact that you are the experts who are supposed to say how it's right, how can it fail?
Jindřich Fialka
That's the important thing, we don't say how it's right, we don't know how it's right ourselves, we just know how to get there. Even when I started the innovation studio, I wanted us to never do work that just ends up on paper. That's what consultancies are for. They come up with a strategy and say here's the strategy, do it, then you do it, it works half or it doesn't work at all and you say they got it wrong. The consultancy will say that's not true because they implemented it wrong. That's a trap I've never wanted to fall into, so our innovation studio never suggests solutions. We analyze the problem, propose concepts, test them, and then tell you what works and show you the results. If it doesn't work, we propose 30 more concepts, test them again, and if three times isn't enough, we say the business model has no potential. There are no customers for it, they can't do it at a competitive price, it doesn't bring them enough value to make it worth building at all. We don't advise, we build new products and services.
How do commercial and non-commercial projects differ?
Martin Hurych
I will mention here in this context that on the same website where it was seen what good design is, you have a bunch of projects or services that have an impact on society. Is there a difference between doing something brutally commercial and something brutally non-commercial?
Jindřich Fialka
Metrics. If we build something commercial, for example with a bank, with IKEOU, the metric is usually profit or some market penetration or reduction in operating costs, in short you have some business
metrics. When we're building a nonprofit or a foundation program, the metric is not how much money it raises, but
how many people I'm gonna help. We have a decision matrix that we had to make for that because how many people I help is not the only metric, it's quantitative. If I help a million people a little bit, that's different than if I help a thousand people save a life. You always have to combine quality and quantity, and that matrix will help us say exactly that within that context it makes sense to aim for a positive impact for tens of thousands of people or so this way and that way.
What project will Q Designers never take on?
Martin Hurych
What project will Q Designers never take on?
Jindřich Fialka
Have you seen Thank You for Smoking? It's a great movie, I recommend it. The whole movie is about the tobacco industry and the main character is Nick Naylor, who was a spokesman for the Association of Conglomerated Tobacco. He was speaking for the tobacco manufacturers in the United States sometime in the 60s, 70s at a time when it wasn't quite 100% proven that smoking caused cancer. He was going o n TV debates and testifying in Congress that it was not yet scientifically proven. In that movie, he met with other spokesmen, the spokesman for the gun industry, the spokesman for the chemical companies, and others, and together they called themselves the Merchants of Death. So we're never going to do anything with the tobacco industry, we're never going to do anything with the arms industry, and we're never going to do anything with an industry that directly harms culture or society.
Where will Q Designers be in 5 years?
Martin Hurych
Where do you see Q Designers in 5 years?
Jindřich Fialka
Still on the Peacekeeper. Our goal was never to build a big innovation studio, because inevitably you jump into the fact that you're actually a bit of a corporation and you have to deal with a lot of politics internally. I always wanted a small, fast, super agile, smart innovation studio that had a couple of teams. At the moment we have 3 teams of 3 people plus some support staff, so there's 15, 20 of us in total.
on 3 new innovation projects. So, if it goes well, every year we will have two or three big new business models plus maybe 5 or 10 small ones. Those are the smaller things that get hidden, which are the refreshes for 3 months. We grow through the projects that we do, so not through getting the size of the studio, because it would lose quality and I don't want that. 2 years ago we started a non-profit called Sto skupin, which builds and runs nurseries in the Czech Republic, and Sto skupin now has 160 employees and 23 nurseries. That's how an innovation studio grows. Second Life Furniture is a business model that is now growing within the IKEY ecosystem and 180,000 pieces of furniture flow through that every year and it works in 3 markets, so that's how we grow our impact and that's what we're all about.
Summary
Martin Hurych
I certainly keep my fingers crossed for you, may you succeed, may the impact you have continue to grow, we will be watching you from afar. If in the digital noise that's everywhere, if there were 3 to 5 sentences left on the air from our podcast, what would it be?
Jindřich Fialka
I would add a little bit to one of those topics. You asked about the difference between designing for the commercial world and designing for non-profits, and I said the difference is in the metrics. In the commercial world it's money and in the nonprofit world it's positive impact. But that doesn't mean that nonprofit business models shouldn't be sustainable. They also have to make at least enough money to be operable long term. So when we talk about innovation studies and the projects that we do, the metric is not just money or just impact, but it's always a combination, because one doesn't work without the other. That's maybe one of the things that I wish would stay because people tend to see business or non-profit as opposite extremes on the same spectrum. But I actually feel like the combination is the right way forward. I feel that business would be most helped if they were inspired in part by non-profit, and non-profit would be helped a lot if they were inspired by business.
Martin Hurych
Isn't it the case that every company has to be profitable and then you can decide where to put the profit? One day I can buy a yacht, and one day I can make an impact on the company.
Jindřich Fialka
Sure, that's a classic strategy. A lot of Czech investors built a company exactly like this, made money, and then set up a foundation and now they are helping. It's great and it works. Another option is to build the business model in such a way that it also helps solve a societal problem. You can make that impact right through the business model and not 20 years from now when you've made the money.
Martin Hurych
So you see, if today we have planted an idea in your heads, a desire to innovate, to think about how your business is working and whether it needs to be moved around a bit, then we have done our job well with Jindra. In that case, I'll repeat my plea from the beginning, give us subscriptions so that you can smooth the way a little bit with algorithms and we can get to more subscribers, listeners and viewers. If you know of anyone who would find this episode helpful, please forward us to your friend or girlfriend. Be sure to check out www.martinhurych.com, where the Ignition chapter has all the other episodes besides this one. For this episode, I'm going to pull a bonus from Jindra about how the whole innovation process should ideally work, so it's already hanging around there at the moment. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks..
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