In this episode of the Ideas to Life podcast Esa Nettamo from Digitalist talks with Timo Tiainen, Director of Concepts and Design at Kone about the pros and cons of an in-house design team compared to using external design consultancy, as well as how to find the optimal mix of these two. Timo Tiainen also talks a bit about his background and explains how a product company like Kone utilize design in order to make their quite traditional products future proof.

Timo Tiainen has been building the Kone design team up from scratch and seen how the company has changed their way of working into a more design led approach. Today the company’s vision is to deliver the best people flow experience and they have been changing the focus from just delivering elevators and escalators, to creating solutions that are improving the way of interacting with technology and enabling people to move about. The interesting challenge is to design the products in way that will last through their entire lifecycle that usually is quite long.