Creating an HCD Learning Experience to Remember for 500 Medical Device Professionals

Helping innovation leaders change culture within a mature company

Case Study

How might we start with patient needs (instead of technology) to transform product and service development?

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is the largest healthcare company in the world. With 130 years of history, J&J has continually used its breadth, scale and experience to reimagine the way healthcare is delivered—helping people live longer, healthier lives. Eager to rethink their product development process, J&J asked MO Studio for a Design Thinking learning experience that would provoke and inspire, beyond a typical speech or lecture.

The MO Studio team collaboratively crafted a custom, high-impact, 90-minute crash course in Design Thinking for 500 cross-functional medical device professionals. The content focused on teaching the fundamental principles, methods, and transformative power of Design Thinking within the healthcare innovation ecosystem. To ensure that participants walked away with a very personal and practical experience, the large group was split into teams and tasked to apply some of the key steps of Design Thinking to a real world design challenge. They were facilitated through conducting user interviews, identify opportunities for design, ideation and prototyping.

Throughout the design challenge, the crowded room became abuzz with excitement, team passion, unleashed creativity, and the freedom to explore wild ideas. In an industry that traditionally relies more on expert panels and other inputs that feel largely removed from the end-user, participants felt invigorated by looking through the lens of patient empathy, cross-disciplinary co-creation, and were charged to bring this mindset and tools back to their teams.

“After your crash course in Design Thinking, it reminded me of the joy and creativity that the product development process brings. I pushed for the design-thinking principles of learning through doing and bringing the consumer into the development process.”
– J&J Customer