Welcome to INNO.LAB ... helping you to make better ideas happen faster

This is a fast and practical approach to business innovation – bringing together insights and ideas, creativity and design, to help you develop better ideas in your business, and make them happen faster and more profitably in your market.

The approach has three phases which bring together many established, and some new, processes and activities for accelerating your ideas into practical action. Much of it can be done in-house, bringing together the right teams and disciplines from across your business, but it works best with a little added structure, facilitation and stimulus. 

  • The ideas factory : Customer insights, future possibilities, and creative ideas
  • The design studio: Shaping and connecting ideas, hypothesise and concepts
  • The impact zone: Evaluating, developing and commercialising the best ideas

A simple process, but with much underneath – taking ideas from the "future back", as well as the inside out and outside in, using left- and right-brain approaches, creativity and innovation, in order to make the best ideas happen “now forward” and to deliver extraordinary results.

We consider these phases in more detail, and then how you can apply them for your executive teams, specific innovation project teams, and across your organisation:

Phase 1: The Ideas Factory

This is about insights and ideas – from the future, in partnerships with customers and experts, and our own imagination – from which we develop understanding and inspiration, direction and hypothesises.

We explore the possibilities, based on future scenarios, customer immersion, parallel worlds, emerging trends and creative ideas. Insights emerge out of the collation of knowledge from different perspectives - “flashes of inspiration” or “penetrating discoveries” – which are then fused with creative thinking.

Insights are much more than information, and create new platforms from which to generate stronger ideas. Ideas are much more than actions, but concepts for making life better. By understanding the problem or opportunity better, we have more chance of creating successful solutions. By focusing on real insights, we develop better ideas that are distinctive and powerful.

Essential tools used in the Ideas Factory include

  • Opportunity maps : finding the best marketspaces for growth and innovation
  • Future radar : understanding how your world is changing, and what it means for you
  • Customer immersion : exploring the real motivations and needs of customers 
  • Parallel worlds : learning from other places who have similar challenges to you
  • Advanced brainstorms : bringing together the best insights and ideas you already have
  • Creative zoning : generating new and better ideas with specialist techniques
  • Hypothesis generation : developing a series of possible futures to explore further

Phase 2: The Design Studio

This is about creativity and design – shaping the best ideas into more powerful concepts that are compelling, practical and profitable – articulating, testing and evaluating each of the best concepts.

We work at the best ideas and hypothesises – reframing the context in which they are positioned, fusing ideas together into richer molecular structures, considering the function and form of these bigger ideas, enhancing their practical usability and aesthetic appeal.

Concepts work beyond products and services - they emerge as propositions, solutions and experiences, perhaps requiring new business and market models. It is then about evaluating each of the best concepts for their value potential for customers and business, how they will make people’s lives better, and how we can make them happen distinctively and profitably.

Essential tools used in the Design Studio include

  • Context Framing : redefining your business in order to address new opportunities
  • Creative fusions : combining new and unusual ideas to creative better ones
  • Design Thinking : applying the principles of function and form to every aspect
  • Concept designs : articulating the bigger ideas, in terms of audience and benefits
  • Product specification : defining the products and services which would deliver this
  • Fast prototyping : drawing and making models of best ideas to test and improve them
  • Evaluation Filters : focusing on the best ideas for customer and commercial impact

 

Phase 3: The Impact Zone

This is about development and commercialisation – making the ideas happen, launching them into the right markets, making them contagious and sticky, and ensuring they deliver sustained results.

We creatively focus on the opportunities that will deliver the best financial return, the best markets, customers, and solutions. Don’t try to do everything for everyone, do things which are significantly different and better. And we don’t stop at market entry - that is the starting point for bringing ideas to life, changing people’s attitudes, encouraging new behaviours.

Delivering sustained results is about finding space in the market that you can make your own, defend and grow. That is achieved by telling your story, in ways that are compelling and contagious, and shaping markets in your own mind rather than being a slave to somebody else’s vision, stretching and evolving ideas so that can have even more impact, and stay a step or two ahead.

Essential tools used in the Impact Zone include

  • Horizon planning : how to make the concept happen in 1, 3 and 5 years
  • Value propositions : articulating best ideas as distinctive customer offerings
  • Market entry strategy : how to reach early adopters, work with channel partners
  • Brand building and storytelling : messages and symbols that have viral impact
  • Licensing and franchising : making your brands and patents go further for you
  • Community building : bringing people together to talk about it, and do more together
  • Market vortexing : sustaining the innovation over time, shaping markets in your vision

How you can make it happen

There are three different levels to the inno.lab process - helping you drive breakthrough innovation across your business, helping project teams to work smarter and faster, and building an organisational culture to support this

  • inno.lab for executive teams : innovation strategy, portfolio and integration process
  • inno.lab for project teams : market, customer and product innovation workshops
  • inno.lab for big teams : customer-centric, creative and collaborative events
  • The process is customised to your business, the specific issues to address and the objectives to achieve. Indeed getting to the right question is often an important part of innovation.
  • A typical inno.lab for a project team - a cross-function team addressing a significant market or product innovation challenge - would involve three two-day workshops with around 3 weeks in between each workshop. The workshops are about high energy, stretch thinking, fast action whilst the time in between is for reflection, improvement and further analysis. 
  • A typical inno.lab for an executive team would involve three away-days, often in advance of the strategic planning process, giving time for new thinking, seeing the bigger picture, looking further ahead, and can the drive specific project team inno.labs from it. The exec team would together build an innovation strategy, focus within the innovation portfolio, and drive action.
  • A typical inno.lab for big teams are one day events - bringing all your sales or marketing people together, or everyone addressing a specific industry or geography - for a high energy series of activities around customer insights, collaboration across boundaries, and creative ideas. This is supported by an ongoing programme of activities - from customer co-creation to Ideastar TV.

  • Finding out more

    From Apple to Alibaba, Maeda to Miyamoto, Zara to Zappos, the best innovators make things happen ... "whatever you can do or think you can do begin it - because boldness has power, genius and magic in it ..."

    Innovation is the most powerful latent force in your business today. To explore how your business can apply inno.lab to drive and accelerate your innovation and profitable growth, then contact peterfisk@peterfisk.com