August 15, 2018

Designing the Future & the Future of Work – The Innovation Engine Podcast with Martin Wezowski

Martin Wezowski, Chief Designer and Futurist at SAP, shares his thoughts on designing the future and the future of work on this episode of The Innovation Engine podcast. Among the topics we explore are the active role we can all play in designing a better future, how Martin approaches driving innovation in a global software giant, and what emerging technologies (and human behaviors) he believes are set to have a major impact on the way work happens.

In SAP’s Innovations Center Networks and Chief Innovation Office, Martin crafts future outlooks, strategies, and products, as well as designing and running innovation frameworks to find out what’s next for SAP. In 2017, he was named one of the 100 Most Innovative Minds in Germany by the prestigious Handelsblatt Financial Magazine. If you’ve been a long-time listener of The Innovation Engine, you may remember him from our episode recorded at SXSW back in 2017.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

You can tune in to the full episode below.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

These are just a few of Martin’s thoughts on designing the future:

  • The first thing that designers do is articulate that solution. Then you prototype that, you articulate it further. As articulation increases in fidelity, all of a sudden, you have a picture of something that will exist.
  • “And if we think about it, that thing will always exist in the future,” Martin says. “So, the future could be two days from now, two weeks, two months, or 20 years. Actually, that timeline doesn’t matter for the design principles there. That is a solution or a wished outcome for a design brief that will exist in the future.”
  • Designing the future is something we all do – for the most part, we all strategize about where we would like to be and we are visionaries about our desired outcomes. That’s a part of design.
  • SAP follows the “Three Horizons” model with specific KPIs for each horizon that they drive in parallel
  • Martin’s CTA: “Have you thought what these futures would be, or are you just working on one dot here and one dot up there, never connecting them together? I urge everybody to connect the dots and actually align these vectors of forces and technologies and changes that we provide to point to the future we all want to live in.”

Resources:

About The Innovation Engine

Since 2014, 3Pillar has published The Innovation Engine, a podcast that sees a wide range of innovation experts come on to discuss topics that include technology, leadership, and company culture. You can download and subscribe to The Innovation Engine on Apple Podcasts. You can also tune in via the podcast’s home on Spotify to listen online, via Android or iOS, or on any device supporting a mobile browser.