Tech Mahindra, a provider of digital transformation and consulting services and solutions has announced the acquisition of Mad*Pow, a strategic design consultancy headquartered in the US. The addition of Mad*Pow to the Tech Mahindra portfolio is expected to help bolster capabilities in customer experience (CX) and digital transformation such as research, experience strategy and service design, user experience design, behavior change design, content strategy, mobile app and web development, design ops, data science and analytics.
The Boston-area consultancy will complement to Tech Mahindra’s existing offerings and capabilities across design, marketing and commerce.
CP Gurnani, managing director and CEO, Tech Mahindra, said, “Mad*Pow’s acquisition is in sync with Tech Mahindra’s global digital charter. With this collaboration, our digital footprint will take a deeper root not just in the US, but in the wider ecosystem world over. I welcome the Mad*Pow team into the Tech Mahindra family, and I am confident that together we will achieve greater success.”
A
pioneer in the experience design field, Mad*Pow leverages strategic design and
the psychology of motivation to create innovative experiences and compelling
digital solutions for global clients. Mad*Pow’s unique human-centered design
approach is fueled by deep empathy and an understanding of behavior science,
which will create real differentiation for Tech Mahindra’s 900+ customers.
Will Powley, founder and chief creative officer, Mad*Pow, said, “Tech Mahindra’s experience and reach will enable Mad*Pow to scale faster by greatly enhancing its digital transformation offerings with existing and potential clients. The collaboration will also create vast opportunities for Mad*Pow to provide it’s unique and differentiated strategic design services to Tech Mahindra’s large global customer base.”
Vivek Agarwal, global head of corporate development, Tech Mahindra, said, “We are excited to announce Tech Mahindra’s key acquisition of a digital asset in North America. The addition of Mad*Pow to Tech Mahindra family will greatly enhance our ability to create and deliver enhanced customer experiences for our global clients.”
Mad*Pow’s
acquisition underlines Tech Mahindra’s focus on digital growth, under the
TechMNxt charter, which focuses on leveraging next generation technologies and
solutions to disrupt and enable digital transformation, and to build and
deliver cutting-edge technology solutions and services to address real world
problems to meet the customer’s evolving and dynamic needs.
By Amy Heymans (Cueva), founder and chief experience officer, Mad*Pow.
Amy Heymans (Cueva)
The scene: a brisk, sunny spring morning by the Charles River in Boston. More than 300 of the health industry’s brightest minds gathered from across the globe for two days of presentations, workshops, discussions and connections. The ninth annual Health Experience Design Conference, hosted by Mad*Pow’s Center for Health Experience Design, took place on April 2 and 3, 2019, and focused on designing for transformative change in health.
Mad*Pow launched the HXD Conference in 2011 to fill a void at the crossroads of health and design, and to explore how human centered design and innovation could transform health. Each year, HXD brings together a diverse community of executives and practitioners in design, innovation, research, strategy and technology to help accelerate the transformation of our health system. Presentations from high-profile thought leaders and health futurists provide inspiration and energy, and thoughtfully designed workshops and interactive activities spark discussions and form connections.
The theme of HXD 2019 was “Real World Change: Improving Health through Design and Innovation.” This theme was explored through presentations and workshop tracks on designing for health behavior change and systems change, health equity and disparities, service design in the healthcare space, and financial wellbeing. Eleven diverse and compelling keynote speakers addressed the conference from the main stage, including Steve Downs, chief technology and strategy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Karen Dillon, New York Times best-selling author; Cheryl Dahle, founder and CEO of Flip Labs; Vanessa Mason, research director of Institute for the Future; and Travis McCready, president and CEO, Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.
Steve Downs challenged attendees to consider how we might use technology to re-imagine and re-shape the fundamentals of everyday life to improve health. For this to succeed, we must establish health as a core value and explicit design goal, and embed it deeply within everything we design.
Karen Dillon, author of NYT best seller How Will You Measure Your Life, encouraged each attendee to ponder the course of their life and whether their resource allocation matches their goals. She urged the audience to consider whether they find intrinsic motivation in their jobs, and whether they’re standing for something they’re proud of.
Cheryl Dahle detailed her work with Flip Labs to tackle the global overfishing problem, and used this example of transition design to highlight the similarities between various complex human systems. Vanessa Mason examined shifting power dynamics in healthcare, including changes in gender norms as they relate to the tech industry, health struggles faced by millennials, and mental health and gaming addiction.
Mad*Pow’s Center for Health Experience Design and Health 2.0 Advocates announce a design challenge, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for the health and design communities to envision solutions that would reshape everyday life to be healthier by default. The focus of this Design Challenge is to imagine how, in the near future, technology might be used to make health a part of our daily routines.
Amy Heymans
“Our systems have made it hard to be healthy, and our healthcare system can’t keep up. The United States spends far more on healthcare than any country in the world but achieves disappointing results in comparison,” said Amy Heymans (Cueva), Mad*Pow founder and chief experience officer. “How might we design the systems we use every day so they support us in being as happy and healthy as possible, instead of worn down, stressed out, and sick? This Design Challenge seeks the most creative minds to imagine solutions that improve health, not just by focusing on healthcare and medicine, but also by taking a new look at the fundamentals of our daily lives.”
Design Challenge entries should include ideas that are feasible in five to ten years, change the environment to a healthier default, and incorporate multiple technologies or components. A Q&A webinar is scheduled for May 29, 2019, at Noon ET.
Interested participants should register by May 27, 2019, to receive more information about challenge requirements, criteria, rules, and deadlines. Final submissions will be due on August 31, 2019 by 11:59 PM ET. A panel of judges, including Vanessa Mason from Institute for the Future, Judith Anderson from Mass College of Art & Design, Stacey Chang from Dell Medical School, Allison Arieff from SPUR and the New York Times, Jeff Rison from the Gehl Institute, and Amy Heymans from Mad*Pow, will choose two winning solutions: one design that targets specific healthy behaviors and one design that envisions broad, systemic change. These two winning entries will be announced on Oct. 16, 2019, and will share up to $10,000 in prizes.
“Many of the tech industry’s early attempts to encourage healthy lifestyles rely on prompting people to make healthy decisions in the moment, while doing nothing to address the underlying infrastructure, norms, and culture that guide our behavior,” said Stephen Downs, chief technology and strategy officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “This Design Challenge will encourage creative thinkers to envision how technology could shape our everyday routines in ways that make healthy lifestyles the default.”
Is your hospital or healthcare organization actually a technology company in disguise? Lots of companies are. After all, to win and hold onto customers, organizations have to make huge investments in IT and technology. At some point if, say, a financial services organization spends most of its money on technology, hasn’t it actually become a technology company that happens to deliver financial services? Are hospitals and health care organizations any different?
The thing is, while businesses are becoming tech companies, successful tech companies have realized it’s not about technology at all. It’s about experiences. Think about Uber or AirBnB: What they’re really selling is an experience enabled by technology.
Welcome to the experience economy. At Mad*Pow, the design firm where I lead experience design, we’re always trying to help hospitals and healthcare companies think about the patient experience as they travel through their healthcare journey.
It’s not easy work. The healthcare industry has gotten more than its fair share of disruption to deal with. Things like electronic medical records and the Affordable Care Act have unleashed waves upon waves of new technology into the clinical setting—none of which plays very well together. Meanwhile, doctors and clinicians have become data entry specialists, sacrificing important patient time for screen time. As a result, healthcare is behaving a bit too much like “sick care,” treating problems rather than treating people. It’s more about the transaction, less about the patient experience.
On the bright side, the industry is responding in exciting ways. Today, more and more hospitals are acting like tech start-ups. They’re sponsoring hack-a-thons to crowdsource innovation within their own walls. They’re incubating ideas from doctors and clinicians to build and test new devices and technologies. They’re partnering with universities and entrepreneurs and private business to fuel and fund and focus their innovation.
