Ingenuity by Siemens

Thought Leadership Platform

Ingenuity by Siemens

Siemens has a reputation for creating groundbreaking engineering and innovation with partners across the globe.

The measure of a firm is ultimately the skillset of its people and we were asked to create a platform that helps export Siemens’ knowledge to the world. The output was Ingenuity by Siemens.

The strategic goal was to turn Siemens’ discipline specialists into thought leaders by providing them with the tools and framework to efficiently structure their thinking into marketable pieces of content while reducing complexity.

Ingenious by Siemens article page - with likes and comments — Testing Caption

Defining Thought Leadership

The definition of a “thought leader” is an individual who consistently demonstrates that they are at the forefront of their discipline by demonstrating this throughout the industry. However, the piece must have the right applied expertise and leading sources to form a cutting-edge perspective.

We’re going to talk about how we created a framework for writing case studies that Siemens uses to write long-form content and explore some intricate interactions that allowed users to engage with our interactive vision.

This brief’s goal was to create a closed social network (with the focus on a bespoke tool and writing framework) that simplified and made communications transparent enough to be easily digested by a wider audience.

The Case Study framework

The framework was split into 5 sections: executive summary, findings, discussion, recommendation and conclusion.

The user could choose to start the process by referencing a material piece as a core subject or the format of the writing piece: case study, expert interview, and curation.

Illustrating the overview of the writing tool

Executive summary

The first section is about setting the context and defining:

The overall purpose
The area and scope
The field of research.

It involved describing top-level issues, illustrating potential change and outlining contents, roles, actors, circumstances, potential cause and effect.

Writing tool - executive summary section

Findings

The author should look at their findings in a systematic fashion, which means looking at what was previously identified and how the problems started, such as what the drivers are, what influences/fuels the problem, the consequences that caused the problem to surface.

When illustrating each problem, the surrounding circumstances should be backed up by industry-relevant, credible sources.
The analysis should be repeated until the author feels they have mapped the context of the problem area, has a solid grasp of the problems and can make connections, or until an assumed dynamic becomes apparent.

Discussion

The next section addresses the connections and dynamics between problems to assess what their root causes might be.
The same approach as before is required to attribute facts and look into drivers, before supplementing opinion and professional expertise to offer a solution.

To choose the right solution, the author should assess all their solutions in a thought experiment. What would be the outcomes of the solution, and could they be measurable enough to solve the problem? Which solution has greater influence over another? Which has a sense of greater urgency?
After outlining the solution, the author should articulate the advantages and disadvantages of their solution to round off the section, outlining the discussion points.

Conclusion and recommendation

In finalising the case study, the author addresses the audience by writing a summary of the main established points by mapping causes, effects and solutions.
The solution should be outlined in detail by explaining what should be done and by whom, the timeline to be worked towards with a rough estimate of the costs, in terms of finance and time.
Lastly, the author should provide a rallying call of action by reaffirming the impact that the solution may provide, and the wider benefits to the industry and/or customer.

Generative Research to find and frame problems

Research

Using Systems thinking to make sense of any subject matter

Information Architecture

Thinking around defining unique aesthetics for brand strategy

Brand Design

Thoughts around the future of brand narrative

Brand Strategy

Measuring Impact

To make use of the information the employees create, systems need to track and measure the created content.
Thought leadership is about changing attitudes to influence behaviour.
The Ingenious platform project tries to get individuals to generate social capital around as many projects as possible to receive backing.
Working with Siemens’ product leadership, we helped them to clarify key questions around measuring an outcome that set the platform on the right course.

Early-stage tracking

We divided an assessment into three measures: input, output, and outcome measurements.
The output is defined by how many additional things were created that refer to the original piece. The outcome is defined by behavioural change driven by the piece. Lastly, the time and money metric is assessed.
Each activity was tracked at a category level while navigating the platform, filtering was used for key search behaviour, and time spent on reading articles.
The user-facing output had two forms of social currency, one was “Sparks”, that allowed inline commenting functionality.

Output measurement

The success of a thought leadership piece is measured by the wider traction it receives, such as how many times it’s shared, referenced and used in press releases and seminars.
Additional collateral was created to back-up the case so the piece could be implemented.

Outcome measures.

These measures include how much social capital it generated inside the platform, the web traffic it drove, and search engine ranking, as well as meeting requests, press coverage and external commentary via social media.

Input measurement

How much time and money was spent on the project, and was it against budget?
What sales were generated, to both new and existing clients?
How much fee income has been generated by the project?
What activity was undertaken around the firm to utilise the material?
What was the project’s return on investment and is it worth proceeding further?

Designing engagement, tracking and measuring inside the Ingenious platform

We wanted to try and make the content dynamic and moving. The thinking process behind this was that ideas and innovation are constantly in flux. The invention process is messy, as we borrow and jump from one thought to another.
Because of the complex nature of the material written, we wanted to encourage situations where people could easily start another discussion. We wanted to visually trace the output within the platform, however, so we allowed individuals to highlight key parts to spark ideas or comments, which proved key to showing the richness of an article.
We emulated traditional social media platforms, based on the nature of the content. It wasn’t a form of validation as is in a conventional “Like”, but communicated an umbrella term for something ingenious or the essence of something with a particular business or discipline value.

We emulated traditional social media platforms, based on the nature of the content. It wasn’t a form of validation as is in a conventional “Like”, but communicated an umbrella term for something ingenious or the essence of something with a particular business or discipline value.

We represented that spark of ingenuity as a lightbulb. This allowed us to have an element of social capital to track the most successful pieces of content.

We felt that the commenting system should change the reading perspective and that opinions could be given an important platform and the interactive design reflects this.

The user had more to read, and a level of depth was there to be explored. When engaging with the highlighted content, the user was taken away from the main article to an abstracted thread of comments.

It functioned the same with attributed material, such as referenced articles or additional media. The effect was to imply to the user that this was a true network of information, which we did through both motion and design.

A user highlighting and liking a piece of text

Ingenuity by Siemens platform was chosen by Siemens employees to create, collaborate on and publish innovative material for their global audience.
Tens of thousands of papers have been created since it went live in autumn 2019 and it continues to push thinking forward on behalf of the engineering community.
The project was one of the most rewarding and fulfilling applications of our creative skills that we’ve been part of.