Page 23 - Miele D The Magazine 2018

T here are not many barriers in the new Building 45 on the Gütersloh company prem- ises. Open-plan spaces dominate and the few areas that are enclosed are laid out as co-working stations. That means that nobody has a xed workstation, rather people work together in teams as necessary. Orange alternates with light grey – not a Miele-like ambience, rather more like a blend of a multifunctional industrial building and a laboratory atmosphere. That is en- tirely intentional, because the Smart Home division, established in 2017, wants to think and work differ- ently. The environment is
intended to inspire that. Smart Home currently consists of 27 employees, which will eventually rise to 50. The core tasks are the strategic development of networked domestic appli- ances, early recognition of trends and technologies and co-operation with platforms, research organisations and start-ups. In product devel- opment the team of Peter Hübinger, who is leading this division, is trying out a different approach. The motto is “Design Thinking”.
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NEW HOME FOR SMART HOME
INNOVATION
Working without a xed work station: the ambience in the Smart Home division is unconventional and inspiring.
working title “Vision Re- frigeration”. In this case six people come together from the areas of marketing, product development and Smart Home and start with a round-up of all questions to do with refrigeration: how can we best support the customer during pur- chase, storage and further processing of food? Up to now, only this much has been given away: in the fu- ture the Miele@mobile app will offer exciting new ap- plications that will genuine- ly add valuein many elds.
Because nowadays many innovations are born in the digital cosmos and not nec- essarily in a proprietary laboratory, Miele is wise to look beyond the end of its nose. For that reason Miele Venture Capital GmbH (MVC) has been estab- lished. MVC works hand in hand with the Smart Home division, marketing and other departments. Once MVC has invested in a startup, a major task is to maintain systematic contact to support the founders in their further development and to ensure knowledge transfer. In the search for startups Miele co-operates with partners
Here, product development is conducted to a large degree from the perspective of the user. Design Thinking assumes that the development process progresses more pur- posefully and rapidly if people from a vari- ety of disciplines co-operate in a creative en- vironment, explore questions together and from this, extrapolate ideas that are tested many times. “We take people from their
original departments for innovation projects and bring them together as an interdiscipli- nary team. A highly creative dynamic then ensues when we engage with customers. This new co-operation is regarded as very positive by almost all participants”, says Hübinger of the new approach.
A practical example of this is a so-called “sprint” (one-week work mode) under the
such as Techfounders and FoundersFoun- dation. Through German Silicon Valley Innovators Miele is connected to the Cali- fornian innovation mecca. First fertile re- sults: Miele supports the food apps Plant Jammer and KptnCook, holds the majority in MChef and works together with load- bee, a cloud-based IT platform for content syndication.
Employees from a variety of different areas come together for a sprint – a one-week project.
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