PwC
Driving Innovation and Change
Opportunity
The Big 4 management consultancies are moving away from being the “providers of services” towards “drivers of innovation and change”, which, in turn, is increasingly being delivered through digital transformation. Naturally, such a shift in service offering for global brands requires various internal and external shifts. From the brand’s long-established public perception to internal culture, attitudes and capabilities.
PwC was acutely aware that to drive these shifts in a meaningful way meant they would need to be delivered genuinely, first-hand and from the ground up. In other words, in experience-led space imagined through the brand’s lens but with their clients ultimate and varying objectives in mind. The resulting space needed to be more than a lick of paint and some call-to-action phrases; it needed to achieve results and manifest real change for our client and theirs.
What was required was an entirely new, locally-rooted “Digital Experience Centre” concept. A space that could solve the region’s most pressing challenges for its most prominent businesses. Ochre was subsequently selected to help make it a reality.
Solution
We spent a lot of time getting under the skin of PwC’s innovation processes, analysing their various functional, strategic, and business objectives and setting them against those of their clients to define a broad set of experience principles. These principles distilled all the varying needs and processes and subsequently formed the foundation of the overall experience design and central idea from which the physical design would be hung.
Our central idea centred around embracing change and the panoply of contradictions it would inevitably uncover. We wanted to marry the bootstrap mentality of a startup and directly contrast that with our client’s established global reputation. The result was a Swiss Army Knife of a space that delivered an experience that could be trodden from start to finish over many days or weeks, dipped into briefly or glimpsed whilst passing. In any eventuality, the experience principles and objectives were delivered through a design crafted around “people” and their “needs”.
The physical design was imagined to ebb and flow based on its users’ needs whilst the aesthetics and tonality shifted radially to reflect the tone of its use cases and requirements, from the corporate board room to the design studio and maker spaces.
Results
Even during the tapering of lockdown when the facility tentatively opened its doors, the Digital Transformation team who occupy the facility saw exponential revenue growth, surpassing all targets. The Experience Centre has successfully achieved its goals in opening up entirely new revenue streams and successfully realigned perceptions of the brand from provider to enabler.
The experience has become the benchmark for our client’s future ambitions. It demonstrates to their own clients the importance of experience-driven environment design, the positive impact it has on those within it and thus the business itself.
On top of all that, it’s also quite a nice place to be.
