To paraphrase Einstein: If you keep taking inspiration from the same old things, you are bound to come up with the same old ideas!
We make huge efforts to ensure our ideation-workshops are packed with stimulus that triggers creative thinking. One of the most inspiring we have run recently, has been for a client who is seeking to target young, stylish, highly-creative adults.
To fire-up the team’s imagination and make sure they were truly in-tune with the world of their target-audience, we took them on a guided ‘cultural tour’ of some of London’s more cutting edge and creatively inspiring areas. A day-long stomp around Spitalfields, Shoreditch, Dalston and Hackney took us from the rapidly gentrifying streets dominated by family-friendly craft shops and foodies-stores; out to the edges of the territory being colonised by conceptual tattooists, artists and the most adventurous of hipsters!
A lot of coffee, some cracking veggie nosh and lots of visual and cultural stimulation later we were ready to start sorting through what we’d seen and begin organising it into ‘stimulation packs’ to get the workshop team really thinking.
The secret to a great ‘stimulation pack’ is the juxtaposition of the inspiring ‘craft’ and ‘experiential’ initiatives the team observed on their day out, with more mainstream case-histories to help the team visualise how they might be scaled and commercialised … to give them the courage to have a go at something equally disruptive themselves.
We shared the stimulation packs in a high-energy creative workshop just a week or so later, where the team generated over 20 creatively-driven springboard platforms for growth.
Nobody had really anticipated just how adventurous some of the concepts were going to get. So, the next task was to evolve the thinking, to optimise the connections between the observed trends and the core product category, in preparation for quant concept filtering
So, if you feel you and your team may be in need of a little inspiration, why not let us know? London’s a great place to explore the streets and stretch you mind. So is New York. But why not Barcelona, Paris or San Francisco? All you need are some comfy shoes, imagination … and the right team to analyse what you see and help turn it into inspiring springboards for ideation. Come on, give us a call!
