Before we go any further, we thought it really important to share with you that we are working with the South London and Maudesley Foundation Trust in developing Buddy. We’re really excited by this for a number of reasons:
SLaM are the biggest provider of mental health services in the UK. They work across South East London, run a very busy mental health trust and a teaching hospital, and have an international reputation for research, working in partnership with King’s College London.
PLUS, they have an amazing history in dealing with mental health which you can read about on their website, that can be traced back over 600 years (including two bits of trivia. One, Charlie Chaplin was a resident of their services at the turn of the century. And two, the word ‘bedlam’ derives from ‘Bethlem’, one of the earliest mental health hospitals in the country, which can be linked to the modern day Trust).
PLUS, they do really cool projects. The Trust has been leading with work on DIY happiness, recovery workshops, film making and they run the Bethlem Gallery, which curates and showcases art by people who have suffered mental health distress, with some awesome works like these being produced.
PLUS, they have bought credibility, insight and experience to the project. Our ideas might have potential, but there’s nothing like people on the frontline with decades (or centuries even) of experience to bring you back down to earth and root the project in a real world problem. This has not only given us great professional feedback with which we can iterate the designs, but it has also given the confidence to have grown-up conversations, now that we have a grown-up partner.
MOST OF ALL, they have really helped us focus the concept and the idea to a particular group, with a defined audience, at a defined time. And it’s this that I want to talk a tiny bit about, in terms of learning. The potential in Buddy is pretty big, in that it is dealing with a big, growing problem (managing long term conditions), that affect a large number of people, who suffer from a range of quite divergent illnesses but who still might benefit in some way through this device. However, in some ways, this is also its weakness. It would be very easy to design a product which tries to cater for all these people, but in all likelihood it will fail, for the obvious reason that it fails to take into account the nuances of the person and their illness. It’d be the equivalent of creating a Burton suit, that fits everyone but no-one wants to wear. In my view the best solutions come from having the best understanding of the problems, and if the problems are too varied, the solution will be too vague it seems.
Also, with any innovation at this stage, there are lots of different benefits it can bring. And in a sense, any innovator tends to trade on that to create excitement and buzz around the product. It’s the old “it could do this”, “it could do this too” and “it does this as well” syndrome. Which maybe all very true and well-meaning, but most things in my experience, tend to find their natural strength or competitive difference around a more defined area. There are not many products or services out there that exceed across a number of different dimensions. Dyson = no loss of suction. But I’m sure when they were developing the original idea, a range of benefits were probably being proposed, from more durable, to it’ll be cheaper because you don’t have to buy new bags, to it’ll get men doing the vacuum. I suspect through development it kind of found it’s centre of gravity or chief purpose.
The trick as I see it is to figure out as quickly as possible what the key benefit and as a result, what the key value of the innovation is. Partly, because a big long list is rarely credible. But also, being able to pinpoint where and how something will improve matters can speed things along.We recently decided to focus our efforts on mental health (a bit more on this perhaps another time). And in turn working with SLaM, we have focused it again on people who suffer acute anxiety and depression, particularly those who are “recovering”. Suddenly, we have a fairly tightly defined group of people to work with, which as well as making life easier, oddly also frees up creativity. Our experience in the last few weeks once we’ve had had this focus, is that it has been easier to develop ideas and to move things forward. Having the boundaries set by the audience has massively helped us speed things up.
And we suppose we have SLaM to thank for that. This post started out just to introduce them but has turned into a bit of rumination on something else. I’d better publish it now and then ruminate on it another time. Think there is something interesting which needs to be explored about the need for innovation to be focused, whilst still being visionary. Hmmmm.
Another time perhaps.
[the two black and white photos are taken from SLaM's historical gallery]
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