Inside MAYA Design’s Innovation Boot Camps

From Kate Rockwood at Fast Company:

The engineer is holding his breath. Beside him, the project manager grimaces. A dozen Emerson employees, all in khaki pants and button-down shirts, are gathered — silent and expectant — around their teacher as he squints at their creations. Back in their real roles, making aerospace controls or medical machinery or marine valves at the $24.8 billion St. Louis-based manufacturer, these people are not often met with bewilderment. But then, they rarely bring raw ideas to consumers either.

Here, in the Pittsburgh offices of MAYA (“most advanced yet acceptable”) Design, a mashup of design firm and tech-research lab, these people are students. Given 30 minutes to imagine a TiVo-like car radio, they’ve built prototypes with construction paper, markers, and stickers. Chris Pacione, director of MAYA’s innovation boot camp, is playing an average consumer — and he can’t find the on button. “Some companies are not used to working across silos — design, marketing, engineering,” Pacione says later. “They still think design is something that happens at the end: ‘Should we paint it red? Or blue?’ They’ll have brilliant minds working on a project for two years before it hits shelves, and it’s not until then they know it’s deeply flawed.” More…