About GE
GE, is a multinational corporation that operates in the following segments: Power & Water, Oil and Gas, Aviation, Healthcare, Transportation and Capital which cater to the needs of Financial services, Medical devices, Life Sciences, Pharmaceutical, Automotive, Software Development and Engineering industries.
The GE Foundries are part of GE Digital, the software development arm of the company. The Foundries mission is to incubate and elevate the Digital Industrial Transformation.
The Foundries are made up of top talent across engineering, development, design thinking and data science. They invite customers, partners and startups to learn about Predix and to collaborate on creating new Industrial Internet applications.
The challenge
GE’s Digital Foundries are meant to take on some of the world’s most difficult and massive industrial challenges and bring them into a new Digital Age. To accomplish this, Foundry teams must work seamlessly across internal and customer functional groups and leadership teams in order to enable customers to take Leaps of Faith into a world they don’t fully comprehend. In many cases, customers don’t even know what questions to ask!
GE Digital’s interest was to leverage Design Thinking as a creative problem solving process ideally suited for complexity, and to engage all the functions within the Foundry team to unleash its potential together.
The solution
Somersault interviewed dozens of GE Digital stakeholders in San Ramon, Shanghai and Paris about their experiences, challenges and aspirations. We then designed a “workout” style workshop that oriented participants to their central Design Challenge: How can we best inspire customers—and ourselves—toward Digital Industrial Transformation? In this workshop, participants conducted User Research with each other to better understand their diverse functional backgrounds, capabilities and goals. They also explored common customer journeys to identify pain points.
The workshop outcomes included prioritized focal points of opportunity (both internally and for customers), along with new solution ideas and plans for implementation (experiments!) which could begin immediately. Participants were left feeling energized and mobilized to achieve their mission: changing our world for Good.
