Jan-Christoph Zoels, partner in charge of user experience design and senior associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, is a keynote speaker at a conference on empathic market sensing on 20-21 September in Hamburg, Germany.

The conference, which is organised by the newly founded Launch Institute, introduces the concept of empathic market sensing (EMS) to industry representatives. EMS builds upon voice-of-the-customer and observational “applied ethnography techniques to dive deeply into how market place agents think and act, and integrates these techniques into an overall innovation process.

The Launch Institute, which was founded by Thomas Engelmann and David Sutherland, applies focused methodology and techniques that tap into the latent innovation potential of organisations to launch new products, services and business models that achieve measurable business growth.