In 2010 Stefan Knoll joined Bosch’s nascent Central UX team as one of the first members and would spend nearly a decade building it into what it is today.

User-centered innovation was a gap in Bosch’s capability landscape—and one its executive team saw as a potential competitive disadvantage.

The long-term goal was to have every business unit be UX-empowered, and that is Bosch’s reality today: All business units have their own UX teams, to the tune of a few hundred people total. The start looked very different, recalls Stefan.

Once the central UX unit was established, it partnered with experts from external user-centered design and innovation firms to test the waters with two lighthouse projects. The goal was to learn how to approach this type of innovation, and “we discovered pretty much right away that the core skill to build up is not only ‘design’ in the narrow sense,” he says. “Insight-generation and sense-making are just as important, and the realization that research and synthesis skills were also needed allowed us to expand the remit of the team.”

Establishing UX innovation amidst resistance

Then-CEO Dr. Volkmar Denner was impressed by the results of the lighthouse projects, which were used as methodology lessons, too. “We created video documentaries about the lighthouse projects, so that we could teach others within the organization how to go about UX innovation projects” says Stefan. “We defined our own process by emulating the process we had observed in the design firms we worked with.”

Not everyone at Bosch was ready to roll out the red carpet. Stefan recalls some existing groups within the company initially felt threatened, particularly those whose remit and core skills most closely overlapped with the UX team. Resistance also came from engineers who were skeptical that the complexity of what they did could benefit from the user perspective. Others saw UX as just another fad to wait out.

Persistent communication and top-down support

Incessant—and Stefan truly does mean incessant—communication with all business units and top-down support were critical. “We had to repeat the same message over and over to overcome those allergic reactions: ‘It is much better to collaborate to move this undervalued area ahead, rather than to compete.’”

CEO Dr. Denner was just as vocal, repeatedly asking BU heads about their progress on the UX front. This put repeated emphasis on the strategic value of the initiative for the overall firm and resulted in a healthy dose of pressure.

While the UX team’s communication was constant, its form was highly varied. They wrote articles for the employee magazine, set up a UX training structure and maturity model, and even handed out prizes, e.g. for the most improved business unit year-on-year. For the first three years or so, they ran the “Disruption Discovery,” in which employees would explore a topic—for instance, the intersection of mobility services with the residential domain—in 8-week design sprints. “We looked for people, not topics. Then we gave them topics and guided them through a UX project.” The team also ran a “UX convention” in venues that skewed from the norm, “basically any location that didn’t look like an office space or a hotel conference center.” As a result, even the images from those events were radically different from the usual Bosch imagery.

From iteration to integration

“We basically iterated on and evolved our take on the UX topic again and again, until we had reached even the most stubborn laggard,” Stefan says.

Nowadays, no special events or promotion are needed for UX innovation. “User experience” and “customer journey” have become common phrases, used by executives and engineers alike. UX is woven into almost everything Bosch does, but the iteration hasn’t stopped. Care is taken to nurture, evolve, and adapt the approach, not just to keep it alive but to allow it to transform in step with both Bosch and the world beyond it.

Now Chairman of digitalswitzerland and a member of the Board of Directors of Julius Bär, Helvetia Versicherungen, Fundamenta, and inventx, Ivo Furrer was previously CEO of Swiss Life, where he introduced UX approaches to his team.

The 2008 financial crisis prompted Swiss Life to reexamine everything. As CEO, Ivo didn’t love what he saw. Digitization was gaining momentum and individuals were increasingly interested in taking a more active role in managing their finances. But the company, a leading provider of comprehensive life and pensions and financial solutions, wasn’t keeping pace. 

Competence needs connection to be valuable

“Our language was very aktuariell. We did not speak the language of our customers, and this was only the tip of the iceberg,” says Ivo. “We were not relevant for our customers.” 

Reorienting around the interplay between Swiss Life’s offerings and their clients’ life reality meant trying a different tack. Ivo brought human-centered thinking and acting into the organization, making the deep understanding of customers the driver of innovation and organic growth. He knew that achieving success involved more than just implementing the methodology. It required taking the entire organization along the journey.

The role of ambassadors in driving change

Ivo discovered it would take time to get senior management and shareholders, and even employees as a whole, to see the value. “In the beginning it was hard to convince people about the necessity of change and what the value of doing so would be for the company and our customers.” The mindset was that business was still OK. The need wasn’t evident. 

Ivo advises letting change agents self-select. He found that about 20% of employees were quick to grasp the need for transformation and the required actions. These individuals became ambassadors, a formal program Ivo created to communicate and bring change to the whole organization, one step at a time. “It took 12 to 18 months for alignment with the Geschäftsleitung [senior management], followed by another 12 to 18 months to establish the ambassador program,” he said.

Another 20% were Ewiggestrige, individuals who clung to the past and were resistant to change and unlikely to ever fully embrace it. In the middle were the 60% of employees who were open to the idea of transforming the company towards user-centered innovation but took a wait-and-see approach. Ivo didn’t make them wait long. They were the ones most likely to evolve into ambassadors in the future, and he knew that time was of the essence. He had to show what good looks like early. “You need to instill a sense of urgency to cut through the Lehmschicht,” or clay layer, he says, a clear declaration that the status quo is unsustainable. He needed to present an appealing vision of how things could unfold. A lighthouse project.

Curating a portfolio of innovation initiatives

The group set out to identify business opportunities that would lead to significant organic growth, and the lighthouse project ended up yielding three distinct offerings: one was incremental (close to their core business), one was revolutionary (a new offering for new customers), and one was evolutionary (a new type of offer for existing customers). 

That last offering was Immopulse, a digital real estate platform that allowed Swiss Life to leverage existing yet untapped organizational data. It provided a middle ground in terms of risk and reward in that the customers were known, but the offer had to be developed from scratch. Swiss Life was sitting on a treasure trove of real estate knowledge connected to its extensive real estate holdings and decided to lean into the connection between wealth building and homeownership. 

The latter is seen as an important part of the former, but the process of finding a home and securing financing requires knowledge and experience that many people, especially first-time home buyers, don’t have. The idea was to tap into Swiss Life’s existing data and create the digital Immopulse platform for prospective customers. Swiss Life’s business was still very analog in 2011, and digital marketplaces weren’t yet commonplace, making the move an innovative one.

Set the stage and invite the curious to join

It was the start of Swiss Life’s transition from a staid, traditional company to a more flexible, reality-adapted organization. Ivo flags important components of the journey: 

Address the whole workforce and embed a UX focus into its DNA, for one. He means that quite literally. The entire organization met each January, and the top 100 to 200 managers and leaders met more frequently in a custom-built wooden arena that was used during thrice-yearly meetings and put in storage in between. Rather than listen to someone on stage without engaging, the round space created a highly accessible environment that lent itself to two-way interaction, Ivo says. People could ask anything and the resulting experience felt like a dialogue.

“Communicate only positively,” is another Ivo belief. “Don't tell me why this cannot work, but how it could!” Use ambassadors to disseminate the message throughout the organization. The audience you are bringing up to speed needs to be a manageable one. You can’t expect the entire organization to learn about UX in lockstep. Rely on selected people, ideally across business units, who are curious about new ways of doing things and lean toward user-centeredness. You can’t identify them by the organizational structure on paper. It’s all about attitude, interests, and openness. Let them self-select and enable them to develop their own narrative rather than giving them an exact message to disseminate. 

Ivo’s bottom line: Communicate, communicate, communicate! 

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In his three decades with BMW Group, Knut Mayser has been at the helm of two customer experience efforts: one that was somewhat additive to the organization, and one that is woven into its fabric.

As part of BMW’s innovation strategy leadership, he currently works closely with the company’s five Erlebnisverantwortliche, a word that roughly translates to “accountable for customer experience.” That’s exactly what these individuals do: They’re responsible for how users experience owning, living with, and using BMW’s products overall, with each responsible for one facet of the experience. Knut works to ensure that the projects they oversee are set up in a coordinated, experience-oriented manner. 

Nowadays, it's not about ‘if’, but ‘how’

The Erlebnisverantwortliche have a defined measure of success: Which percentage of our customer experience-relevant projects make it into development projects and, hopefully, into cars? Knut meets regularly with teams to set up, manage, review, and steer projects and says the feedback on the approach has been solid. “By now, everyone understands that a holistic approach is the only way forward for a brand that prides itself on delivering a premium user experience.”

His initial foray into user-centered innovation with BMW provided a stepping stone for the current structure. In 2016 Knut took on the role of head of BMW’s Innovationswerk, or Innowerk, which was focused on cross-functional user-centered innovation. Rather than put technology first, as is traditional in the automotive sector, Innowerk started with the customer, determining how their needs could translate into an experience and only then considering how technology could make that a product. 

Knut explained that by the time he joined the Innowerk team, it had run two larger design-thinking projects at that point, which served as a template. As with every new undertaking, there was room for improvement in how those initiatives had been run and received. No wonder—to most, it was a new approach and one that didn’t involve the affected departments. “My job was to make Innowerk more broadly known by exposing more people to it and involving them with UX projects and then carry the results into the wider organization,” he says.

It was a networking-heavy effort at first, finding out which group had needs that could be met through a UX approach. “We spent a lot of time communicating, visiting individual business units, giving talks, conducting educational workshops, and soliciting feedback both to generate leads and make our presence known. We selected from our leads strategically, so that we would be touching the maximum breadth of the organization.”

A small team on the hunt for big impact

While the people Innowerk reached were always highly positive about the approach (maybe not surprising considering a pre-selected group came to its events), the unit also had challenging limitations. Potential impact was always the most important criterion by which Innowerk selected its briefs. Projects had to contribute to the business outcome and result in pre-development projects to be considered successful. That wasn’t always easy to track. In addition, Innowerk’s core team never numbered more than four people, narrowing its capabilities to a single project at a time.

The intention was to considerably scale up Innowerk over time, but in some ways, it had run its course. Innowerk had served as an important crystallization point, one that drove the entire organization to embrace these methods more. UX no longer needed to exist as a separate entity. With BMW’s leadership changing and the pandemic bringing a dose of uncertainty, Innowerk was shuttered. But it had set the stage for the more integrated UX structure around the Erlebnisverantwortliche that is core to the company today.

Top management now accountable for UX

Knut reflects on his Innowerk learnings: “We always relied on engaged stakeholders in the business units that we worked with. If they were excited, it worked. With every project we did, we managed to involve leadership more and stay involved after the initial project for longer. The last project was our best in that respect. That would have been the template going forward, had Innowerk continued to exist. It became clear that we needed to anchor UX accountability much more within the business unit leadership. We took the responsibility for the overall experience out of the trenches of detailed engineering work and handed it to a few senior leaders who were accountable for driving it holistically. That’s a good thing.”

For an Innowerk-like unit to succeed in 2024, Knut believes it would need to be bigger: much more capable, and with much more capacity. “To make a real competitive difference, it takes more today than back then. There is much more knowledge and acceptance of user-centered approaches. And it would need to push beyond developing vehicles.” That’s why post-Innowerk, BMW has formed a so-called Group Invention approach, contributing to a much wider scope of user experiences shaping a broader scope of innovative technologies. 



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Have a thick skin and be patient. That’s one thing Marta Lago Arenas learned in her seven years helping Amgen build and evolve its UX capacity.

Looking in the rearview mirror, she reflects on what she wished she had known on day one: “If things don't go as planned, take it easy and give yourself time. Don’t beat yourself up about things not working right away” or exactly how you pictured.

The job of the UX team was to help Amgen’s commercial teams maximize the value of the company’s therapies by surfacing unmet needs and opportunities to improve patients’ experience "beyond the molecule." 

Innovation – central, science-driven vs. local, user-driven

While scientific innovation is very prominent in the pharmaceutical industry, the practice of integrating human-centered approaches into how medications are developed, delivered to patients, and positioned in the healthcare system is a relatively recent one. Healthcare systems are diverse and complex, so regional and local organizations hold the key to adapting and shaping innovation efforts in ways that have real impact. Traditional, industrial-like top-down approaches to innovation fail constantly. 

Marta’s realm was “customer experience,” which had her navigating and collaborating with global, regional, and local stakeholders and running flagship projects. The broad nature of her experience can offer learnings to others looking to integrate a UX capability into an organization that’s just as far-reaching. 

She found successful innovation efforts require commitment and close collaboration between global design teams and local organizations, who have the pulse of the market and health ecosystem. This starts with defining the value for each stakeholder, internal and external. In that sense, it is co-design from day one.

Hiring for experience and permeability

When forming a UX team, she looked for people who:

prioritized people (in this case, patients and caregivers), who put them in the center and had the methodology to do so
were “permeable”: able to learn from their environment and from other disciplines
harnessed co-creation and trans-disciplinarity to the extreme
were comfortable speaking the languages of science and business. Otherwise, their ideas wouldn’t make it through the frameworks of the organization and beyond

Once on the ground, a balancing act was required. Marta found that it was key to acknowledge both the differences of each country and the shared nature of fundamental patient needs, which are similar across geographies. She gives the example of preventative cardiovascular care: After a cardiovascular event, many patients feel overwhelmed, disengaged from the system, and incapable of adhering to a healthier lifestyle that would help them lower their risk of having a subsequent event. This is true across the board.

Human experiences tend to be universal – solutions must be contextual

Solutions can also be shared between countries so long as there is deep collaboration and a focus on cross pollination. Overall needs, solution archetypes, contents, and modules can be transferable, while the delivery model, positioning, and partners involved can be localized. To that end, Marta set up ‘innovation network’ events, where countries could showcase their UX work, learn from each other, or discuss relevant topics. They also used this as an opportunity to train local organizations in relevant UX skills. 

She found the narrative of success tricky, especially in the early phases of transformation. True innovations are rare. An organization that is committed to achieving success ought to consider multiple ways it can take shape (including as it pertains to learning, engagement, etc.), and be patient to absorb precious learnings.

And yet … “it’s not rocket science.” It’s a journey, and there will be insights and opportunities along the way. She cites one small win that she can share as an example. There was a care continuity issue between University Hospital in Zurich and home-care once patients were discharged, and the solution was an extremely simple one: a paper pass they dubbed Herzpass that allowed patients to keep all their relevant medical information in one place and made it available to both their physician and the hospital. What made it work was that it was realistic and achievable in the short-term. 

Presence, attention, collaboration create opportunity

But insights and opportunities are nothing unless they are seized, and doing so requires coaching, handholding, and communication. “The mere existence of information will not do ANYTHING for the organization,” Marta says. Part of the job is to design learning journeys and pathways, but a lot is purely about presence, attention, and collaboration. “Oftentimes, the demand is created simply because you created the space for dialogue and communication.”

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