[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 10min]
Where do new ideas come from? Produced by the global innovation consultancy Continuum, this film is about design strategists and how they identify the right ideas. The notes below are golden nugget excerpts from the script, edited by me for conciseness while adding my own perspective logic for flow, and to fall within the boundaries of fair use. So while I didn’t indent the text, make it red, or place it in italics, consider it their thinking 
and a wee little bit o mine.
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Sometimes people’s needs are to be surprised and delighted. The challenge is that they can’t tell us what that entails, so hence the role for dialogue, inquiry, and creativity. The goal being: to find the Right Idea.
What is Design Strategy?
Design Strategy is a way for a company to identify, claim, and act on a business opportunity. To build and enact such strategies requires a very eclectic mix of people with backgrounds in design, business, technology, social sciences who works together in a very flat organization. Roundtable-esque, if you will. Attempt to take every team member’s different perspectives and bring them together around a cohesive idea. It’s about using the multidisciplinary view and figuring out what the right solution is between all the different tensions that exist out there.
A good design strategy is Actionable. You look at it and know what to do next; the project plan is intuitive. In the course of ideation and inquiry, you end up with the Insights instead of the Ideas, whereupon the knowledge about the customer is deeper, but the question of what to do next looms.
An Insight is a really good Question - An Idea is a really good Answer. So even the best consumer insight is really only a question. Oh the consumer’s really trying to do this. Great, that’s a good question. How do we help them do that? The fact that we question and keep coming up with new tools for each part of the process is important, but then it’s the people (team members) applying the process that makes it all work.
The healthy approach to take as a design strategist is to deliver what people need and want, not about what we think we can provide them. Once we figure out what that entails, the role and importance of creativity jumps to the top rung; How should we deliver that? The difficulty lies in creating for a future orientation.
The Right Idea
Getting there is a dual path whose mutual destination has to answer the working questions:
- What problems do we need to solve?
- What solutions best address them?
At this point, we’ll know what features need to be designed. Following this path can often lead to technical innovations. This is the objective/technical side of the equation.
On the subjective/humanistic side, we’re trying to channel into what people value. What are people really trying to do, understand, or achieve in their lives? Their aspirations tell us more than their past product choices do. From here, we can envision what the future looks and feels like for them. What the ideal experience should be.
Truly resonant ideas marry both sides of the framework: Objective/Technical and Subjective/Humanistic.
Always starting with the values keeps innovation connected to what people care about.
Going from insights to ideas is a creative and iterative exercise that relies on the ability to connect diverse learnings into a cohesive story. It’s a lot like solving a riddle, where you have to figure out which clues matter and which ones don’t, and make some leaps in logic. Or like putting together a puzzle. Not all the pieces gathered end up mattering in the end.
What we do have at the end is a clear direction that aligns the team. This is the idea in words. Frame the idea as a question; in doing so, we challenge ourselves to figure out what form the answer should take. Maybe it’s a new service, rather than a new product. Perhaps it’s a whole new business. Envision the idea to the point where it’s real enough that somebody can experience it. The reason we prototype stories, experiences, and products is so one can problem solve in real life. Tinker, challenge constraints, and make the ideas work.
It’s very easy to hide behind a 100 ideas, and that’s why we [at Continuum] choose to stand behind One Idea. The right idea that works best. The only way we know it works, is to test it with people. So after we envision it, we evaluate it with our consumers because they hold us accountable. Is it understandable, relevant, different, believable? We don’t always get it right the first time, so we use feedback to iterate until we have the confidence to go forward into design & development.
What Should We Do Next?
Once we know the idea resonates, we’re ready to make it real.
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I found the video to be one insightful way for an innovation & product/service development process to work, whether it be from an in-house team or a third-party agency. Now, to be results oriented, there are some essential elements not discussed in this video for time constraints reasons, and also because this is partly a marketing video for Continuum.
Project Management baby! Now while I’ll assume that the ideation aspects are covered, what need to be further stressed is the fit analysis in terms of: technical, customer, financial. Secondly, the business case has to be drawn. The project’s alignment with its innovation capabilities and portfolio fit has to be examined.
Now to be fair, the line of reasoning I’m taking here deals particularly with New Product Development (further info from a Stage-Gate perspective). In the larger scheme of things though, we may just simply be trying to make incremental changes to the way a product/service performs. Perhaps we’re doing a bit of R&D, which carries a bit of a freewheeling nature, as opposed to NPD. Either way though, time is money. Therefore, objectives, timelines, and participant roles need to be defined. I don’t want to make this all seem militaristic and cookie-cutter. The process needs a lot of air to breathe so that creativity may roam, unabounded.
That’s just what I think…
What about you?
