Three Power Tools to Accelerate Innovation
Harnessing the power of workshops to deliver stronger innovation, faster
Great innovation processes aren’t just packed with inspired ideas, they have an impetus and energy of their own. Everyone working within them is equally committed to a great outcome and changing the world!
For over two decades, we’ve been working with our clients to deliver innovation pipelines that aren’t just packed with fresh, relevant ideas … but that quickly and cost effectively deliver millions of pounds of growth.
We run Blue-Sky Brainstormers, Small-Team Incubator sessions and we’re even experimenting with Virtual Workshops Online. All with the intention of helping you deliver more innovation, faster and more cost-effectively!
Harnessing the power of multi-functional Blue-Sky Brainstormers
Innovations are seldom delivered by just your core innovation team.
However passionate and committed they are, they need the brainpower, commitment and energy of the whole multi-functional business team to be fully aligned before they can deliver transformational change.
When your objective is to gain team commitment, spark ideas across disciplines and pile-on fresh inspiration – our Blue-Sky Brainstormers are unbeatable. They’re designed to inspire, excite, stimulate and get participants exchanging ideas across functions – before building disruptive, but actionable concepts across the course of one, two or three days.
The secret of preparing and delivering a really successful Blue-Sky Brainstormer is fresh stimulus. It can come from ethnography, consumer safaris, external expert witnesses, even simply revising and reassessing your current knowledge – but it needs to help your team see the world from a truly ‘fresh’ perspective!
We’ve successfully harnessed Blue-Sky Brainstormers to deliver success-stories in categories as diverse as babycare, beer, insurance, cheese, confectionery, food safety, heart health, stain removal and whisky! Imagine how we could help stimulate the way your team thinks about your own category?
Accelerating team productivity with Small Team Incubators
Once you’ve got your ideas generated, teams aligned and full commitment, the next challenge is to start actually activating the innovation process.
That’s where too many clients make the mistake of letting their innovation projects get bogged down in ‘meetings’ rather than moving rapidly through the stage-gate process. We recognise that a structured process is required, but there are better tools
Our Incubator workshops are cerebral, small team thinking-sessions, but they are run using full-on workshop rules and creative problem-solving techniques. So instead of getting bogged down in debate, the team focuses on how best to maximise the probability that your innovations will successfully pass through the next stage of your innovation process.
We use Incubators to create structured, creative environments within which 8-10, carefully chosen, highly-focused members of your team & our catalysts can come together to dissect your challenge, explore alternatives and work out how to solve it – fast and effectively. Because they are run under workshop rules, they are always much more positive, focused and results-oriented than a classic meeting.
We’ve successfully delivered Incubators for clients: exploring executional routes for ideas, building concepts, incubating concepts, concept crafting … even strategic planning, insight mapping and equity modelling!
Maintaining momentum with Virtual Workshops Online, even with remote teams
Whilst Blue-Sky Brainstormers are great for stimulating thinking, and Incubators are great for delivering against more focused challenges – there’s a school of thought that some of the most imaginative ‘breakthrough thinking’ is done quietly, reflectively and without distraction from your peers.
The logic is, that you need to be able to reflect, free-wheel and make lateral connections, if you are going to make previously unanticipated connections. This is why so many ‘aha’ moments take place when in the shower, driving or even just drifting off to sleep!
Our virtual workshops have been developed to allow distributed teams to address challenges, share knowledge & brainstorm as part of a joint-team – but then let them reflect on the challenge and generate breakthrough solutions on their own time-line – in preparation for a second stage of timely team sharing and building.
Virtual workshops creatively repurpose online collaboration tools and typically last 5-10 highly structured days. They’re designed to bring together the benefits of team brainstorming with quiet contemplation and as a side benefit, they can save everyone lots of travel time!
We love Virtual Workshops power to bring teams together to generate ideas, let them have space to think quietly … and at the same time as providing a strong framework for getting things done!
If you’d like to find out how our creative workshops, can help help accelerate your innovation pipeline – please do give us a call +44 1491 411272