Scorsese’s message about innovation for 2020

2019 was a beautiful year in film. Already at its beginning, The Green Book won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Dimitar Marinov (the Bulgarian actor playing Dr Shirley’s Russian cellist) made us feel a little prouder about that Oscar here in Bulgaria. Somewhere in the middle of the year, Tarantino offered us “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and put together the brilliance of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And shortly before the year ends, Martin Scorsese gives us a 210-minutes long film featuring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.

And before you think that at launchlabs Sofia we have become film critics instead of a business redesign studio, let me reframe the first sentence. 2019 was a beautiful and innovative film year.

If we take The Irishman movie alone, we see an innovative combination of digital technology and distribution. I’m talking;

/ on one hand about the special effects by Lucasfilm studio, which allow the three great actors to play their characters with a 50-year span in the same movie – thanks to some cameras and software they ably play 70 years old wrinkled gangsters and 20 year old slim boys,

/ on the other about the choice to distribute the movie primarily through Netflix instead of movie theatres only, which allows valuable business data to be gathered for future releases.

It is easy to dismiss these as smart technologies and smart business decisions, but the truth is that they bring a totally different experience for the end user – the audience. If you allow me to use our favourite launchlabs terminology – this is a deliberate redesign of the spectators experience and is not accidental, but masterfully realised by Scorsese and his design team.

This redesign of the experience is possible in the first place because the team knows the audience. And they know us well. Scorsese and team know that a three-and-a-half hours long film is better watched at home. For the comfort. For the freedom to control the play/pause button. And for the silence, which we also control and it only makes the Anna Paquin’s act better.

Unsurprisingly the audience embraced the autonomy and turned The Irishman from three and a half hours long movie into a six hours long movie experience, which we could never have in a movie theatre. We became co-designers of our own experience. And yes, some of us had to borrow the office beamer for the full-screen experience, but we all know accessible home theatre technology is a matter of time.

Of course this movie experience would have never been possible without the masterful curation and management of a multidisciplinary team and network of partners. We are no experts in movie making, but we counted more than 30 different design disciplines that contributed to the movie production. Space here wouldn’t suffice, so we won’t list them. We’ll only share that the management of so many creatives is a powerful achievement in its own right. And that as spectators we should be very proud that a co-designer role was left for us in their ranks.

We won’t argue if you liked the movie or you didn’t. What’s truly interesting for us is the creation process. The design and redesign of the experience. As we said, we’re no movie critics, we’re a business redesign studio. Our goal as a team is to help companies create new and better experiences for their clients. That is why we work to redesign the way companies think and work from within. We redesign the mindsets, the office environment and make space for multidisciplinary, agile teams and ways of working.

This year, Scorsese simply reminded us that innovative experiences come not just from using smart technologies and taking smart business decisions, but from knowing your users and making them co-designers over and above a multidisciplinary team of professional designers. Something we aspire to do and will continue to do in 2020 in our humble way.

For 2019 we would like to thank to all the companies, which gave us a chance to work together – Accenture, Roche, A1, RaiffeisenBank, Ligna Group and Planex Invest, to Tsotsorkov Foundation, Tuk-Tam and Arc Academy. They allowed us to work on meaningful projects and to rub shoulders with the global innovation trends in the fields of SmartHome, TeleHealth, NextGen Gaming and many more. We would also like to thank our network of launchlabs offices in Berlin, Basel and Bangalore as well as to ourselves – for going successfully through all the hurdles and for sharing a common vision for 2020.

We will be delighted if you are part of our journey in 2020!

Elina and the launchlabs Sofia team