RCVS is the regulatory body for veterinary professionals in the UK. The role of its innovation arm Vivet is to support and encourage veterinary professionals to embrace innovation in their professional lives. Vivet commissioned us to find ways that would encourage more widespread innovation amongst vets, beyond just technological improvements.

We used our design thinking expertise to develop and deliver a series of design thinking inspired virtual events. These included:

a foundation webinar, introducing the 5-stage design thinking process with illustrative examples relevant to veterinary care, and experiential breakout sessions, enabling participants to practice some tools and techniques associated with the ‘ideation’ and ‘prototyping’ stages.
a series of online creative thinking activity sessions, linked to celebrate World Creativity and Innovation Week. These activities were experiential, fun and taught participants how creative techniques to both develop and address everyday problem statements such as, ‘How might we encourage children to read more?’
an in-depth webinar that explored design thinking in action, using animal health case studies to illustrate specific elements of the process.

Outcomes:

Vivet received universally positive feedback from participants for the introduction of our design thinking process and the case study content that brought it to life.

Vivet also valued the ‘action learning’ approach – especially suitable for a “hands-on” veterinary professional audience used to a learning style of both theory and practical application.

We are currently developing a Hackathon for Vivet, which will bring veterinary health professionals together from multi-sites and multi-disciplines to work on a specific real-world challenge that they have in common whose outputs can be tested and rolled out within their place of work.

Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS)