The goal of any ideation work is to discover ideas to be leveraged into new ways of moving your business forward, whether through product and service concepts, or business processes and stakeholder motivation. Our industry and ideation experts work with you to deeply understand your business needs and to identify the best methodologies and participants to provide you with creative and actionable ideas.
Our Approach to Ideation
We emphasize:
- Obtaining ideas from multiple audiences:
- Innovation teams, current / potential customers, other stakeholders.
- Integration of industry knowledge:
- Industry knowledge + ideation expertise = successful research execution.
- Keeping an open mind:
- Go where ideas lead - do not foreclose options.
- Harris facilitators / moderators are experts – go with the flow to affect true discovery.
- Developing fully-realized ideas for implementation:
- To move easily and rapidly to screen and prioritize newly-discovered ideas.
- Leveraging individuals strong in creative, out-of-the-box thinking, when feasible.
To reach YOUR solution, we:
- Deeply learn / understand your business needs.
- Identify the right participants for your ideation work.
- Draw upon a comprehensive suite of ideation tools and methodologies – usually several:
- Ethnographic explorations of consumer behavior identify consumer needs or desires based on behavior.
- Monitoring social media explores ideas being talked about online.
- Traditional focus groups and ideation sessions are tried-and-true tools.
- A unique collaboration with Ideas To Go,Inc. produces extensive concept development with truly creative consumers.
- Advanced Strategy Lab® (ASL®), our unique collaborative brainstorming process (online or in-person), distills multiple ideas to those most impactful and actionable.
Our Philosophy of Ideation
Regardless of ideation method or audience, we typically use an “expand and contract” philosophy to provide an overarching structure to our ideation work:
Adhering to this philosophy with open-mindedness provides the strongest opportunities for generating feasible innovative concepts for development and prioritization.