Giving Compass' Take:

• Emily McGinnis and Eli MacLaren share Business Innovation Factory's design methodology that incorporates feedback at every step. 

• How can philanthropists be more connected to their communities? 

• Find out why funders should seek feedback from grantees. 

Our mission at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) is to make business model transformation safer and easier to manage. We believe that business model innovation is on the critical path to transforming education, healthcare, and public services, our most important social systems, whose users are not adequately served. Tweaking existing systems won’t be enough. Instead, we imagine, prototype, and test new, more collaborative models with end users in the real world.

Human-centered design is core to our approach. Participative by nature, end users of products and services are at the heart of our design process, and their agency is enabled within it. The approach is both generative and evaluative – meaning we use customer feedback to inspire new ideas and to assess how well ideas are working. Customer input and continual feedback throughout our design phases are key to making it effective. We have codified our approach to business model innovation in our BIF design methodology, a methodology for designing next practices and new business models.

While our business model design process encourages the participation of the people these models seek to serve from beginning to end, there are three key moments in which feedback plays a critical role in shaping the product of our process– a viable new organizational capability or business model.

  1. Leveraging ethnographic research to inform design.
  2. Rapid prototyping and testing to get us better faster.
  3. Community critiques for more expansive solutions.

Read the full article about a design methodology by Emily McGinnis and Eli MacLaren at FeedbackLabs.