LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 32 – LPRC Innovate ft. Jordan Burchell

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

This episode was recorded live at LPRC IMPACT 2019! Host Tom Meehan, CFI, (CONTROLTEK) talks with LPRC’s own Jordan Burchell about how LPRC is driving innovation in the retail setting by utilizing virtual reality, augmented reality, eye tracking, and other emerging technologies, inside the NextRetail Research Center and the Ideation and Simulation Lab. The post CrimeScience Episode 32 – LPRC Innovate ft. Jordan Burchell appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reid Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of ControlTech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. This week's episode was recorded live at Impact 2019. Jordan Burchell, LPRC Innovation Manager, discusses how LPRC is driving innovation in the retail setting by utilizing virtual reality, augmented reality, eye tracking, and other emerging technologies inside the Next Retail Research Center and the Ideation and Simulation Lab. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. Bosch integrated security and communication solutions span zones one through four in the LPRC

zones of influence, while enriching the customer experience and delivering valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at Bosch security.com welcome everybody again to another crime science podcast episode brought to you live from Gainesville Florida today what we're going to be doing is Tom is going to spend some quality time with LPR sees innovation manager Jordan Burchell Jordan's going to lay out for the listening audience, if you will, what we're up to with LPRC Innovate, and more specifically, the LPRC's next retail research center, which is a component of Innovate. But the short story for me is that we knew we needed to do

some more things on the front end of our innovation chains. And by that, what we're talking about is we're trying to establish and in fact have and will continue to grow our capability, our capability to be problem solvers with our members. But I want to turn it over to Tommy and Jordan Burchell for a discussion on LPRC Innovate. Hello and welcome to another episode of the LPRC's Crime Science Podcast. We're here live at Impact 2019. And I have a very special guest, Jordan, from the LPRC. Jordan, why don't you tell the listeners about the Research Center? I know that during the Impact Conference on day one, we got to tour it and

really look at it. And it's an amazing facility. So can you give the listeners a little bit of what you've been working on? I know you've been really spending a bulk of your time on it. Yeah. So the Next Retail Research Center, as I describe it, is an ecosystem for human center design thinking in retail and retail loss prevention. And so how it came about was about a year ago, a group of our retail members approached us and asked if we could create a new set of research capabilities and spaces to allow us to innovate. And one of the things we were really keen on looking at is backing up in the development process of solutions.

And so historically what we've done is, for some context, brought behavioral science to solutions that already exist. So a solution provider has created something, we're interested in how it works in the actual built environment of the store to deter the red shopper and hopefully not disrupt the green shopper. We want to bring that further back

in the development process. So the thought was, can we leverage what we understand about human behavior and psychology when we're actually making the solutions? And can we build a set of spaces where we can engage with solution providers and retailers in that way? So that was kind of the genesis of something called LPRC Innovate, which was a panel that we put together and an internal initiative to figure out how to do innovation at the LPRC. And the next retail research center that you alluded to

is one of the fruits of that effort. So at that research facility, there's a number of spaces and capabilities that we're really excited about. The first space is the ideation lab, and that is a flexible and modular space where we can really get into problem solving and approaching really old problems in a new and exciting way.

It's designed to be flexible and modular, so different teams can come in and use the space however they need to. And it's really a great environment for bringing human-centered design and design thinking to the space, to criminology and to loss prevention where it hasn't been as prevalent as maybe in other verticals. We then move from the ideation lab to the simulation lab, and that is where we can start to bring the ideas that we come up with in the ideation space to life. And some of the key technologies in that simulation lab are our human-scale projection environment. So we'll try our best to describe it over audio.

You kind of have to see it to understand it. But this is a surround projection screen. Screens are approximately nine feet tall and it wraps around an entire 32 by 32 room. And so you and your team can stand in the middle of simulated imagery and understand how different options work on a human scale. So it's obviously more immersive than looking at this stuff on a tablet or a computer or whatever. And then the other key component of that is virtual reality, which is maybe the thing I'm most excited about pushing into. We can take our ideas, simulate them in virtual reality,

and the tagline I like to use is, you can redesign your store in the morning and then have shoppers shop in it in the afternoon. And as we build more realism into that virtual environment and add more objects to the sets of objects and spaces that we have to use, we can rapidly create different options for layouts, place technologies in those layouts, and actually eventually place associates in those layouts

and then bring the red shopper and green shopper through them and collect a whole bunch of really cool data. So eye- eye tracking data, biometric signatures, did they notice our virtual PVM? If so, how long did they look at it and what was their heart rate when they looked at it? So getting a lot more granular information, a lot more detail beyond our typical survey research. So those are kind of the two main spaces in the place so far. Next year, we're going to unveil a mixed reality space. And that's going to be a marriage of actual solutions and digital imagery.

And then finally, a proprietary space we're calling Deep Space as kind of a code name for the project, where solution providers can interact with us in kind of a proprietary way that's locked down. So, you know, and to your point, it is very difficult to explain this visual experience through audio, but I would encourage anybody to go to the website and take a look at it. There's certainly some photos today on social media from Impact, but we talk about the simulation space. It's such an immersive experience. Can you shed a little light? You mentioned a little bit here you get a teaser about the eye tracking

and really what that means for a retailer today. I know when I describe the immersive space, I took a bunch of pictures. Really, you're immersed in it. You're in this room, and you walk in, and the simulation lab allows you to look at what you'd really see. And that's, for me, being a visual guy, in and the simulation lab allows you to look at what you'd really see. Yeah. And that's, for me, you know, being a visual guy, I mean, I walk in and I think of all the possibilities.

But then when you layer in the potential for biometric data or the eye tracking data, I'm very interested in the eye tracking. I'm sure our listeners are as well. Can you give just a little bit of a teaser on what are some of the things that you see coming with the eye tracking technology? Yeah. So one really easy to understand example is with signage. And so a lot of retailers engage us around signage. How do you create a sign that catches the attention of the red shopper,

communicates a deterrent message to them that they understand. But that also isn't like abhorrent to the green shopper. So you can't create something that's ugly and disrupts the sales environment that other members of your organization are trying to create. And so we test these now in actual stores. We create signage options. We put them up and we bring people in to look at them. What we can do in a space like this is have our background of the store, how it would appear when you're actually there. And then we can layer in, as you were saying, in the form of objects, 50 different signs. And we can run through them.

And then with the eye tracking component, we can know down to like the millisecond how long people spent looking at the different signs. And we can modulate the placement and we can modulate what the background looks like. And so we can know in a given context which sign performs the best in terms of noticeability and then with heart rate tracking and galvanic skin response tracking we can know if there was an emotional spike that correlated to the red shopper noticing that sign and so right now how we achieve that is by asking them we take them into the store and we go did you notice this and how did you feel about it and now we can get really just a lot deeper understanding around those same questions and so it's a nice extension and a natural extension of what the LPRC has

always done. So you also and you know you did a great presentation in front of the whole group yesterday at the conference can you give just again a teaser I know we can't really cover all of it the design thinking methodology. I mean, in my world, from a production standpoint and a development standpoint, it really is something that is used regularly. But I think you're embarking on taking advantage of all this technology and innovation and a concept of design thinking. Could you give the listeners kind of an overview of what design thinking is and how it will help or change the way solutions or problems are solved? Yeah, so when we were looking at starting these innovation initiatives or efforts, we recognized that we needed some capabilities. We've talked a little bit about that and the spaces to kind of harness and provide context for those capabilities.

But we needed, like we were talking before we hopped on the mic, a process for that. Like how do you reliably use these tools to produce meaningful insights? And so we kind of started looking at human-centered design thinking. And this is basically, the way that I like to think about it is you're looking at the development of new technologies or new processes or whatever it is

that you're trying to innovate around through the lens of the end user. So looking for insights in the experience of the people that are actually going to come into contact with what you're going to create and then using that as a launching pad for innovation. And so you're trying to tease out insights from the experience someone has in a store, for example. If they have an extremely good or an extremely bad experience, you can dive into that and use that as a launchpad to do something differently. And on its face, it may seem like a departure for LP and AP. A lot of people probably have the opinion that that's for other types of folks working in the organization. Like, we don't do human-centered design. But LP and AP teams deal all day every day

with people. And the LPRC is an organization of behavioral scientists. And we're, you know, really focused on the psychology and the behavior of the red chopper or the criminal offender. And so you can use all that analysis to do the same stuff as a launch point for innovation. And so the way I see our, you know our backlog of research reports in the last 20 years is basically a pool of behavioral information to generate these insights for innovation and then as a launch pad to move into the next steps of design thinking. So to me, it's a really good marriage that may not be obvious off the top of people's heads.

I think as you introduce it to members, I think everybody will really see the value and embrace it. I think it's a hard concept to adapt to if you don't know it, especially for LP professionals, you know, that really have been doing it for a long time and have already kind of said, okay, I know what I need. This really challenges that and challenges you. You're flipping it. Yeah.

Like moving from an engineering focus almost where it's like what are we going to do next? We need to innovate. Well we can make it smaller or we figured out how to do this thing so we'll do that and then flipping it to go like what do people need? What do people need that they

don't know they need yet? And how you answer those questions beyond just waiting and hoping that someone comes up with something is by observing people in the environment, interviewing them, and immersing with empathy, fitting into the themes that we've been covering over the course of the conference to understand their experience as they move through the environments that we're testing in. And I think it's very interesting because we talk about innovation,

and you have the ideation space and the simulation space. And really the design thinking exercise will force you to remember there's a human involved. It'll force you to keep the human element because it's easy to swing to technology. So I think it's going to be a big win for the members. And I think we're going to have a lot there. So I have one last question for you, which is really about because the LPRC has grown so much and you have all these different places where does the innovation lab fit into this because you have this lab and I think there's a lot of people that are now going well which lab is which so you mean like the innovation lab that we've always had yeah for the last five years at least so we have um rechristened that the

research lab um and so historically we've had an innovation chain that we've used for our research that has moved from that lab space, which used to be called the innovation lab, to our store labs that retailers provide to us, and then to broader ecosystems, which brings together different data sources and kind of a larger community context. And we think that that three-step process remains, and that we've just added steps to the beginning of that so you would progress from that ideation space to the simulation space to the mixed reality space to the research lab where we now have an actual you know physical simulated store and then to the store labs and so as you move through those spaces you basically progress through

levels of realism and the ideation, you're only thinking about stuff. And then as you move forward, you've got now rendered digital imagery and then some actual solutions placed within that digital imagery. Then the solution that's hopefully ready to test in the research lab and then in a store and so on and so forth. Does that make sense? Perfect sense. I think it's very helpful for the listeners especially.

There's so much going on and it's great. It feels like we very helpful for the listeners, especially. There's so much going on, and it's great. I mean, it feels like we're moving at the speed of light. I remember when seeing the space just a few months ago and how much progression we had. So thank you very much. Always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Likewise. Yeah, we should do more of these. Absolutely. So very exciting. We're really closing out Impact 2019. It's been a great conference, huge attendance. Thanks, everybody, for listening.

And until next time, be safe out there. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Laws Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more Crime Science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Thank you.