Professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) has partnered with the Royal College of Art’s (RCA) Service Design School and non-profit innovation collective Fuzzy to launch an innovation lab focused on tackling some of the biggest challenges facing the UK healthcare industry.
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Tied ropes to signal collaboration
The new collective, known as the Health Challenge Lab, will connect RCA Service Design MA students to UK-based healthcare, business, and technology specialists to explore solutions to healthcare industry issues and challenges via a series of projects, seminars, and research. RCA students will drive activity, establishing teams that are complemented by health, strategy, and technology specialists from A&M and Fuzzy.
The model encourages collaboration between these leading public sector, non-profit and for-profit organisations that specialise in human-centred design to devise innovative solutions for the healthcare sector that are economically and technically viable. All outputs, primarily in the form of product and service prototypes, will be stress tested based on how beneficial they are for end-users, how feasible they are to implement and how economical they are to produce.
The Lab will run for an initial 12-month period, with preliminary briefs focused on mental health, primarily in response to the burgeoning mental health crisis in the UK that is only set to deepen as the cost-of-living crisis intensifies. Other areas likely to be explored as the lab evolves include cancer and oncology, neurodiversity, and inclusivity.
Alex Barclay, senior director of design at A&M and Fuzzy founder, said: “The combination of A&M’s operational heritage, Fuzzy’s innovative and rapid approach to problem-solving and the brightest minds in human-centred service design that the UK has to offer is a unique ‘coalition of the willing’. We are excited to see the Lab’s response to the initial briefs on mental health, and to demonstrate the merits of this collaborative model to develop innovative and scalable solutions.”
Professor Clive Grinyer, head of service design at the RCA, added: “Innovation in healthcare requires a combination of deep industry expertise, technological skill, creativity, system thinking and empathy, with understanding of the human experience at its core. The Health Challenge Lab will give healthcare organisations in the UK access to a network of specialists that will demonstrate the power of human-centred design in solving some of the most complex problems that the industry is currently facing. Involvement in the lab will also offer our students a unique opportunity to develop their skills and create services that can genuinely improve people's lives.”
