Industry Project 2025/2026: Kemira
- Jun 26
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 3
The IDBM Industry Project Course is a seven-month journey of collaboration, exploration, and innovation, where students addressing real-world challenges in collaboration with our industry partners. This year, we’re inviting you to follow 10 different stories as our teams move through different stages of their project journeys.
Our IDBM project with Kemira focused on redesigning the company’s newly introduced Innovation Playbook and exploring how it could become more engaging, practical, and widely adopted across the organization. From the beginning, the challenge felt less about redesigning a single framework and more about understanding how innovation practices
became part of people’s everyday work.
One of the key decisions early in the project was to begin stakeholder interviews almost immediately. We wanted to build our understanding through the experiences of the people who would actually use the playbook in practice instead of defining the direction too early ourselves. The interviews helped us better understand existing innovation practices, identify barriers to adoption, and see how differently innovation work could be experienced across the organization.
Based on the interviews, we gained a clearer understanding that our role was not simply to refine the content of the playbook, but to rethink its UX design and understand the whole innovation process step by step. The early conversations helped us identify which parts of the experience seemed most important for improving usability, engagement, and adoption across the organization
Following the first rounds of interviews, we continued the project with a study trip to the UK. Before the trip, we had contacted several UX design companies and arranged visits with two different firms in Edinburgh.
We ultimately began the journey in London and travelled north to Edinburgh through Cambridge. Alongside the company visits, the trip also gave us time to continue reflecting on the project direction and the broader role of design within large organizations.
Exploring London
We began the trip in London, where we spent time exploring the city, visiting landmarks, and trying different restaurants. During our stay, we visited places such as Chinatown, The British Museum, and Big Ben, alongside many other well-known sights around the city. Our visit to Chinatown also happened to coincide with the Chinese New Year celebrations, which made the atmosphere there especially lively. Alongside the travel itself, the trip also gave us space to step away from the usual project routines and continue discussing ideas in a more informal setting. Many of our conversations around the project’s future direction emerged naturally during shared meals and quieter moments around the city.
More Exploring London
From London, we continued by train to Cambridge, where we stayed for one night. Walking through the city’s historic streets and university surroundings created a noticeable contrast to London. During our time there, we also began planning the topics and ideas we especially wanted to discuss during our upcoming company visits in Edinburgh.
In Edinburgh, we visited two UX and innovation focused companies, where the discussions gave us new perspectives on designing digit al tools within large organizations. The conversations focused especially on longterm usability, simplicity, user involvement, and the importance of aligning design decisions with broader organizational goals. We also discussed the growing role of AI in digital products and how innovation practices can be integrated more naturally into everyday business operations.
Company Visits in Edinburgh
For our team, the visits were valuable not only because of the professional insights, but also because they encouraged us to challenge our own assumptions and think more critically about our design process. They helped us develop a clearer shared understanding of how we wanted to move the project forward.
Before returning to Finland, we also got to spend time exploring the city itself, visiting local landmarks, exploring Edinburgh Castle, enjoying good food, and browsing through several beautiful bookstores around Edinburgh.
Exploring Edinburgh
Back in Finland, we began exploring possible design visions based on both the stakeholder interviews and the insights we had gathered during the trip. The conversations, company visits, and time spent reflecting together helped us approach the challenge with a broader understanding of how innovation tools could support people’s everyday work within large organizations.
Once we had presented three different design visions to our partners at Kemira, we began developing the selected direction further into a prototype. At the same time, we continued interviewing key users, whose feedback helped us shape and refine the concept throughout the process. Gradually, the project started to feel less like designing Exploring Edinburgh a standalone tool and more like building something that could genuinely support innovation work in everyday practice.
Working on design visions
The journey with Kemira was both inspiring and collaborative. Our partners were consistently encouraging, open to new ideas, and interested not only in the outcomes themselves, but also in the thinking and exploration behind them. That openness gave the project space to evolve naturally and helped create a strong sense of trust throughout the process.
The trip itself also became an especially meaningful part of the project for our team. Spending time together outside the usual project setting helped us get to know each other better, strengthened our collaboration, and created many of the conversations and moments that ultimately shaped the direction of the work.
Learn more about the team:
Dion O’Leary (IDBM, BIZ)
Juho Talsta (IDBM, CHEM)
Matilda Kaisto (IDBM, BIZ)
Juho Karkinen (IDBM, BIZ)
Ayla Zhou (IDBM, ARTS)
