Skill insight can clarify your competitive position - comparing Fjord, Frog and IDEO

Design companies are built on the skills of their people. They celebrate their projects but it is the people and their skills that deliver these projects. TeamFit has developed a Skill Inference technology that is able to integrate data from many different sources to infer skills. It is usually used inside companies to build skill maps and find potential skills, but it can also be used to infer skills from public websites. Here we looked at the websites of Fjord (part of Accenture), Frog Design and IDEO to see what skills each company has. (To see how this is applied to client in differentiation see Skill Insight is an X-Ray to See Client-In Differentiation.

For each company, we looked at their public projects and ran the data through our Skill Inference engine. This generates a rich set of skills associated with each project. Knowing this, we can begin to look for the core skills contained at each company and explore their differentiation. This simple tool below lets you see the skills of each of these iconic design firms and then to explore what skills they have in common and what skills are unique.

Click here to open the comparison module
Tap on and tap off to apply filters.

I will focus on design and foundational skills here, but it is worthwhile playing with the tool to see the unique and shared skills in other skill categories such as domain skills, technical skills and business skills.

The top design skills shared by all three companies are Architectural Design, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Urban Design and Design Management. Nothing surprising here, but it is interesting to see just how important architectural design is at all of these firms. In my own experience, people with training in architecture often make the best designers.

When it comes to foundational skills, the skills used to build new skills, the top four skills are Creativity, Play, Cognitive Science and Ethics, with Innovation, Systems Engineering and Learning tied for fifth. This is an enviable set of foundational skills and it is nice to see that Play scores so well at all three companies.

The list of unique design skills for each company is rather thin. For Frog we find User-Centred Design (but we know from other recent work that this is synonymous for Design Thinking in many people's minds), Design Strategy (that is interesting), Hypertext (a word I have not used for a while but is actually the foundation of a lot of current design work) and Visual Communication. Frog does have some unique technical skills around software development (Agile Software Development and Software Design-Engineering-Project Management Frameworks). This suggests it may have more software development muscle than the other firms.

At IDEO, the unique design skills includes Rooms, Ergonomics and Product Design. The unique foundational skills are Design Thinking, Formal Sciences, Decision Theory and Game Theory. To me that suggests something about the approach IDEO will take to projects–that it will be a formally sound approach informed by relevant theory.

Fjord is new to our data set. Here the unique design skills are 3D Imaging, Charts, Diagrams, Infographics, Interface Design and Metadesign. Metadesign–I had to dig in and see what other skills are associated with Metadesign (the TeamFit Skill Graph, our data structure, allows one to explore questions like this). The skills associated with Metadesign are mostly around education but also include Inquiry and Architecture. Inquiry also shows up as one of Fjord's unique foundational skills, along with Time Management, Ideation and Logic. Fjord has been part of professional services giant Accenture since 2013. It was acquired to add skills in creating digital experiences for consumers. Explore Fjord's skills using the comparison tool above. Does it have the right skills for this mission?

Individual skills do not tell the whole story. More important is what groups of skills are used together. We used a clustering analysis to investigate this (TeamFit used this algorithm to find people, projects, roles and even skills that are similar to each other).

One can quickly see that IDEO has chosen to present a much more diverse set of projects than Frog or Fjord.

IDEO's largest cluster has 33 projects. The skill cloud for this cluster is shown below.

Frog's largest cluster had ten projects and was centred around Hydrology and Waste Management.

For Fjord the largest cluster had 19 projects and a very diverse set of skills.

Project level views give a lot of insight, but sometimes we just want to get an overview of a company's skills. In TeamFit, we use the company skill map to do this (ignore the Skill Rank here, we need access to internal data at this point to get an accurate fix on just how much expertise there is on a particular skill). IDEO puts more projects on its website than do Frog or Fjord, and this at least partly accounts for the greater number of skills.

IDEO

Frog

Fjord

TeamFit's Skill Inference technology is the most powerful way to see inside an organization and understand the skills it is bringing to projects. The Skill Inference gets more powerful the more data it has access to and the richer the underlying Skill Graph that it is leveraging. When internal data is available a rich and accurate picture of the skills of an organization and how these are being applied to actual project work comes into focus.

Contact us if you are interested in using TeamFit to gain competitive insight or to better manage the skills and expertise inside your organization.