I don’t mean, hey wake up and smell the coffee – you’re going out of business!!!

I mean, change is happening and you are being affected. There’s an opportunity to innovate if you read the signs of disruption and act before your approach becomes “an exaggerated attitude”.

There are many times when a prospective disruption is announced, only for it to fade away unnoticed. A great idea, a charismatic founder, a well-funded start-up: you’ve seen it all before. A novel idea followed by a funding round and then…nothing. Nothing happens all the time.

But disruption can happen differently. Change can occur silently in markets aa consumer reaction is carried along with it. In these cases, a new solution grows quietly, people refer it to their circle of influence and before long, there’s a success story to write up as a great example of human-centred design.

An exaggerated attitude

Listening to a veteran WWII pilot describing his approach to landing on an aircraft carrier in a big sea, he made nothing of the size of the waves, the instability of the landing deck, the speed and unpredictability of the wind, or the metaphorical tightrope he was walking. All he said was, “we approached the deck at an exaggerated attitude”…and yet his meaning was clear.

Discussing whether a training centre would reopen to finish a teaching course, the student was asked if the course could be delivered online. She replied, “no, that would deliver a far reduced experience.”

No fanfare. No declaration of failure. No signal that a new solution is needed, but the message is clear and the opportunity stares out.

Drive

Problems across markets are often disguised by a clever turn of phrase, or ignored by management teams who don’t respond appropriately. Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, tells of company bosses gaming numbers and performance-based decisions to focus on the short-term, where the need is actually to play a longer game. This is not in the personal interest of those chasing a performance-related bonus, but it is what a strategy might demand.

5G

Arguments are currently raging (and will probably continue to do so) over 5G technology.

Huawei is the undisputed frontrunner in commercialising 5G and is the leading supplier to government-sponsored organisations around the world. But Huawei’s Chinese origins engender suspicion and it has become the bad guy of telecoms. The US won’t work with them and the UK is back-tracking. All this against a backdrop where the CEO of British Telecom says that to strip Huawei out of its infrastructure will take at least ten years. There isn’t a single person at BT who will be in the same job in ten years, so that withdrawal from using Huawei ‘kit’ is probably already doomed.

While the arguments go on, businesses will continue to develop 5G products, launch them to market and try to make money from them. The disruption will grow, the value proposition will become ingrained in every part of life, and the noise in the supply chain won’t make the slightest difference. Huawei will inevitably attract competition but, by then, the ways in which 5G has integrated our way of life will be too far evolved for it to be outed, until another wave of disruption tapers in. It will probably happen.

Other trends to watch?

RPA will continue to do the grunt work that people used to do; healthcare is moving towards being preventative; cars will be full electric; shared transport will shrink as individuals find ways to travel without being crushed up against somebody else – think bikes, eBikes and scooters; plant-based eating will outstrip consumption of animal protein, cash is fading out in some markets, social media is the heartland of conspiracy theory. These are just a few of the viewable mega trends where disruption will affect consumer behaviour and supply chains. Companies used to selling meat processing or spark plugs, please note: your markets are in slow and irretrievable decline.

I don’t mean, hey wake up and smell the coffee – you are going out of business!!!

I mean, change is happening and you are being affected. There’s an opportunity to innovate if you read the signs and act before your approach becomes an exaggerated attitude.

Future thinking. Future proofing. Innovation training. It’s what we do.

Back on the 6th of February we posted a blog called ‘The way you do anything is the way you do everything. Innovation in 2020’ and reminded you that 2020 was 10% done already.

Unfortunately, it’s also true that nothing we know in May was how we imagined it would be in January and the forecasts you had in the business plan weren’t accurate. Some lucky brands have been winners through the COVID-19 crisis but lots haven’t been.

Today, more than ever, a structured yet expansive approach to future-proofing is an essential part of the innovators toolkit. Now, at the start of May, 2020 is 30% done and everything has changed, including the way you do it.

The following is a reminder of what we asked you to consider in February. The same questions apply but the context has changed.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything. Innovation in 2020.

2020 is 30% done. How was it for you? The next obvious question is, what has been different so far this year?

For example, have you tried pulling an article out of Le Figaro or Welt and dropping it into Google Translate to see what the EU mainland thinks about Brexit?

Or, how about, reading some CES 2020 reviews?

Or have you looked for clues where you’ve always looked, or where you know your competitors look? With 30% of 2020 behind us, doing more of the same isn’t going to provide you with the business insulation that’s probably needed this year.

Adjacent opportunities can be found and grasped. Longer term scenarios must be mapped and reviewed. Constant and tenacious interrogation of your market dynamics and consumer behaviours is imperative.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

If you are taking care of business today with only an occasional look at immediate threats, the way you will react is occasional and immediate.

Regularly working on your future makes your opportunities appear regularly. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

There is a way to work in your future.

It’s a way to work in the 2020-2030 decade and know what you need to do next, and then next… Download it here. Take a look and start a working differently today.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

Please get in touch for a chat. It might just help helpme@room44.co.uk

Innovation comes in many shapes and sizes but even when it’s done well, the problem of resistance to change rears its head. A proven process will help to make innovation stick.

Don’t do that

What you can’t do is expect brilliance from an ideation session without preparation.

It helps to include people in the process of deciding what the change is going to be. Make designing an innovation plan the responsibility of your team, with your endorsement, and it will pay back in many ways – not least in signalling that change is on the way. This helps to make your innovation ideas stick.

Make innovation sticky – step 1

Spotting trends and signals: seeing things differently

It starts with knowing how to interpret signals from the market, and how to join the dots to inform your own developed strategy.

Click here to learn more.

Make innovation sticky – step 2

Design Thinking – focus on transformation

Experience and logic tells you that you should be acting differently as your markets change, and yet you probably commit over 90% of your resource to doing the same things you did last year.

This is the break you’ve been looking for: to step away from your everyday responsibilities and invest some of your week into a new way of working.

Click here to learn more.

Make innovation sticky – step 3

Making innovation stick: a culture of change

How you present innovation impacts directly on how your colleagues receive it.

Take a step towards achieving this by bringing your colleagues into the process. There are some simple ways to prepare them for the task ahead.

Click here to learn more.

Successful innovation launches depend entirely on the processes you engage to make them happen.

Put these steps together and you’re equipped to innovate successfully.

Future-thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

2020 is 10% done. How was it for you? The next obvious question is, what has been different so far this year? It’s not always easy to read but it is true to say that the way you do anything is the way you do everything.

For example, have you tried pulling an article out of Le Figaro or Die Welt and dropping it into Google Translate to see what the EU mainland thinks about Brexit?

Or, how about, reading some CES 2020 reviews?

Or have you looked for clues where you’ve always looked, or where you know your competitors look? With 10% of 2020 behind us, doing more of the same isn’t going to provide you with the business insulation that’s probably needed this year.

Adjacent opportunities can be found and grasped. Longer term scenarios must be mapped and reviewed. Constant and tenacious interrogation of your market dynamics and consumer behaviours is imperative.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

If you are taking care of business today with only an occasional look at immediate threats, the way you will react is occasional and immediate.

Regularly working on your future makes your opportunities appear regularly. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

There is a way to work in your future.

It’s a way to work in the 2020-2030 decade and know what you need to do next, and then next… Download it here. Take a look and start a working differently today.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

Unsure about how to plan to succeed in the 2020-2030 decade? Checkout our 10, 20-30 programme here.

10, 20-30 is a framework for delivering a future-proofed mindset to your team, business and lifecycle.

Why?

Every day, there’s a new disruptive business story, a new tech start-up raising millions to change something, someday.

On the flip side, and at the same time, there is regular reporting of start-ups and established firms going under. Uber loses a founder, WeWork takes a tumble and other unicorns report a year of negative returns and lose their shine. Sometimes, some things are too good to be true.

The reasons for missed ROI targets and, even closures, are many and various and all start with an assumption: you’re alright, because somebody will always need your paper, water, chocolate, steel work, cosmetics, legal services, financial advice, cars, office space…or will they?

But…

With a properly critical look at your future, at your consumer behaviours and your market, it’s possible to see what’s coming down the line to compete with you. And there will be something on your horizon that will cause some of your older revenue streams to dry up.

There it is. An uncomfortable truth maybe but one to watch none-the-less. With insight comes the opportunity to future-proof yourself.

So what?

Working with teams to create roadmaps to a profitable future, we can find that everything looks different.

You will define what your business is going to be. You’ll plot your path of baby steps so everyone knows what they must do from the minute they hear the plan.

We always make it clear that the output we create together isn’t a plan for someday: the output we generate by working with you is a plan you can use now.

Forecasts are guesses

As a process, ours is an easy one to understand. Pick a point in the future, use radical insight to inform what’s needed for that strategic end point to be viable and plot the product developments that will get you there. As far as ROI is concerned, you’ll have a general impression of size and shape.

However strong your forecasting function is, and we’ll probably disagree on that, they are guessing just as much as you are. Of course they have models and spreadsheets to justify their view of the world, but you have one thing they don’t – and that’s insight driven intuition.

This is the magic sauce that could bring your CSuite to the party.

Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘fuzzy front end’ or ‘future forecasting’. What they point to is a future sales figure that amounts to the same thing really: guesswork.

Intuition

Your senior management has been around long enough to get into the CSuite. They’ve worked through cycles of business to achieve the sort of insight that can only come with time served and they know, more often than not, what good looks like.

So, if you can’t get them involved in the actual process of innovation, it’s worth bouncing the odd ball down the board table to see where their interest lies, what sparks their excitement, and where their intuition makes them look.

Awareness vs trust

In the digital marketing rule book, we are told there are three phases to online marketing: awareness, trust and conversion. It’s the same across your business structure and vertically from bottom to top.

Being noticed isn’t the same as being trusted, but getting an innovation concept through the stage gates means tapping into what becomes a reason to believe.

This may sound a bit too much like pragmatism to be true innovation, but innovation ultimately is a matter of commercial survival.

Today, you need a plan. If you don’t know where to start, or how to sell it in to your CSuite, get in touch. We do.

In the meantime, you can download our free guide to ‘Selling innovation into your own company’ here and get detail of our 10, 20-30 programme here.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

Every day, there’s a new disruptive business story, a new tech start-up raising millions to change something, someday.

On the flip side, and at the same time, there is regular reporting of start-ups and established firms going under. Uber loses a founder, WeWork takes a tumble and other unicorns report a year of negative returns and lose their shine. Sometimes, some things are too good to be true.

The reasons for missed ROI targets and, even closures, are many and various and all start with an assumption: you’re alright, because somebody will always need your paper, water, chocolate, steel work, cosmetics, legal services, financial advice, cars, office space…or will they?

But…

With a properly critical look at your future, at your consumer behaviours and your market, it’s possible to see what’s coming down the line to compete with you. And there will be something on your horizon that will cause some of your older revenue streams to dry up.

There it is. An uncomfortable truth maybe but one to watch none-the-less. With insight comes the opportunity to future-proof yourself.

So what?

Working with teams to create roadmaps to a profitable future, we can find that everything looks different.

You will define what your business is going to be. You’ll plot your path of baby steps so everyone knows what they must do from the minute they hear the plan.

We always make it clear that the output we create together isn’t a plan for someday: the output we generate by working with you is a plan you can use now.

Forecasts are guesses

As a process, ours is an easy one to understand. Pick a point in the future, use radical insight to inform what’s needed for that strategic end point to be viable and plot the product developments that will get you there. As far as ROI is concerned, you’ll have a general impression of size and shape.

However strong your forecasting function is, and we’ll probably disagree on that, they are guessing just as much as you are. Of course they have models and spreadsheets to justify their view of the world, but you have one thing they don’t – and that’s insight driven intuition.

This is the magic sauce that could bring your CSuite to the party.

Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘fuzzy front end’ or ‘future forecasting’. What they point to is a future sales figure that amounts to the same thing really: guesswork.

Intuition

Your senior management has been around long enough to get into the CSuite. They’ve worked through cycles of business to achieve the sort of insight that can only come with time served and they know, more often than not, what good looks like.

So, if you can’t get them involved in the actual process of innovation, it’s worth bouncing the odd ball down the board table to see where their interest lies, what sparks their excitement, and where their intuition makes them look.

Awareness vs trust

In the digital marketing rule book, we are told there are three phases to online marketing: awareness, trust and conversion. It’s the same across your business structure and vertically from bottom to top.

Being noticed isn’t the same as being trusted, but getting an innovation concept through the stage gates means tapping into what becomes a reason to believe.

This may sound a bit too much like pragmatism to be true innovation, but innovation ultimately is a matter of commercial survival.

Today, you need a plan. If you don’t know where to start, or how to sell it in to your CSuite, get in touch. We do.

In the meantime, you can download our free guide to ‘Selling innovation into your own company’ here and checkout our 10, 20-30 programme here.

10, 20-30 is a framework for delivering a future-proofed mindset to your team, business and lifecycle.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

Retail space is display space. Not selling space.

It’s three years since British Home Stores went into administration. Three years, and so many signals that UK retail is not in a happy place, yet successive retail failures quickly followed. The demise of Toys ‘R’ Us and Maplins added to the signs that all was not well, but the reassuring voices of other major high-street names told us not to worry – they were on the case.

Long-standing brands are continuing to fall away, more quietly perhaps, but the rate of attrition is now established. This week, we learnt that Mothercare’s stores will follow Thomas Cook’s by soon vacating all their premises.

At the current rate, the UK is losing 110 retail stores per week from the ‘most popular town centres’, according to PwC. Sixteen a day. If you haven’t noticed yet, you’re either in a big city, or maybe you never had them in the first place.

Retail space is display space. Not selling space.

Shoppers are spoilt for choice when it comes to getting what they want at the cheapest-on-display price. Mothercare may have done a great job at displaying brands for parents -to-be to try, but why would they buy there?

The press accused Mothercare of being ‘expensive and grotty’ this week: neither of these things happens overnight. ‘Grotty’ happens when there isn’t enough money to refurbish, and ‘expensive’ happens when the competition has undercut you for so long that you need to sweat the maximum cash out of every sale.

Thomas Cook, apparently, hadn’t noticed that people don’t buy holidays from a brochure anymore. Maybe they’d never heard of Ceefax, let alone the internet. Mothercare didn’t understand its customers’ digital tendencies – or it chose to ignore them.

So, in the company of Jack Wills, Staples and Bonmarché, we’re likely to see another gap in the UK retail landscape this year.

Who loses?

You and me. I needed to buy a printer last week and I tried to do it by going to a store. It didn’t happen.

John Lewis was, frankly, atrocious. If customer service and a two-year guarantee are now their only USPs, I don’t see them surviving. Curry’s/PCWorld couldn’t sell me what I wanted and there just weren’t any alternatives. My town (@miltonkeynes) sits at the heart of the UK’s technology ‘Growth Arc’ and it seems more than a little ironic that basic products and services for the growing ‘technology’ population aren’t on sale.

As much as I hated to do it, necessity and convenience drove me to Amazon and my new printer arrived inside 48 hours.

Will this continue?

Should we expect more of the same? Should we get used to hearing ‘not another one’ when a high-street brand vanishes? Hell, yeah.

In the last month, we’ve met around eight SME businesses that won’t be in business in three years’ time. The signals of change are loud and clear, but the need to stay loyal to a founder’s vision has over-taken the acknowledgement of the blindingly obvious.

There’s even a networking business that has suspended one of its groups through a lack of interest. If ever there was a sign that grass-roots start-ups are pulling in their horns, this is it.

What are we doing about it?

It’s all very well sitting here and bleating about how bad things are, and how Amazon is taking over the world, but what is room44 doing about it?

Two things

Firstly, we’re diversifying and investing in a new activity stream. We’ve been writing about environmental matters for a long time and we’ve decided that we should do a bit more than talk the talk. We’re about to walk the walk as well (more about this later).

Secondly, we’ve built a product that will help companies, like yours, plan to outlast your competition and thrive in a tough market. It’s called 10, 20-30. Together we will build product launches to take you through the next decade and provide you with the tools to launch at least one per year, so you stay relevant in a changing market.

Because we take seriously our capacity to deliver quality, it’s only available to a limited number of clients. Take a look at the 10, 20-30 proposition here and get in touch if you’d like to know more.

Thanks for reading and, if we don’t speak, good luck.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

To look for insight where you’ve always looked, or where you know your competitors look, isn’t going to provide you with business insulation.

The eruption of new business start-ups and the resultant increase in business failures makes the chance of existing business faltering higher than ever before.

Adjacent opportunities must be sought and grasped. Longer term scenarios must be mapped and reviewed. Constant and tenacious interrogation of your market dynamics and consumer behaviours is imperative.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

If you are taking care of business today with only an occasional look at immediate threats, the way you will react is occasional and immediate.

Regularly working in your future makes your opportunities appear regularly. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

There is a way to work in your future.

It’s a way to work in the 2020-2030 decade and know what you need to do next, and then next… Download it here.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

Go to a packaging or any other trade show, and see the plethora of ‘sustainable’ claims displayed on stands.

The initiative to reduce consumption of virgin raw materials is well-intentioned. Consumers, aided by a gathering momentum around circular product design, have begun to turn the tide, and a new awareness of value beyond the product now takes account of the huge cost that environmental myopia has had.

But changing to a recycled material to do the same job as the virgin one doesn’t produce less waste. A new, ‘sustainable’ product might only be a bit less damaging, or slightly different quality, than it used to be. ‘Sustainable’ doesn’t always mean better.

Sustainable doesn’t always mean better

Newly recycled and recyclable waste may be re-processable a finite number of times, and new industries will spring up around the new circular material flows. Good news.

However, we’re missing a point. While industry peers applaud alternative product developments and re-utilise a material type a few more times than we used to, we’re still making as much product; as many pieces of packaging; as many pieces of plastic to collect and reprocess; as much material that won’t find its way into the recycling stream.

We understand. Of course, businesses are trying to adapt to market demand and stay in business. But the changes being initiated across markets take time, irrespective of how long the IPCC says we have left to avoid irreversible environmental damage.

Consumers take responsibility

The onus now falls to consumers to take responsibility and tell producers what they will accept. As the saying goes – stop buying crap and they’ll stop making crap. As long as shoppers keep buying processed foods packed in a modified atmosphere, and keep eating products that travel too many miles, there’ll be someone to meet that need.

Consumers need help in this regard. A little less convenience and a little more bias towards home-grown, seasonal foods will reduce the need for clever packaging. A bit more availability of these options in more places will catch the eye and help a broader uptake.

Casualties of business

If this kind of behaviour catches on, and products are priced at their true value rather than at an artificial level made possible by industrial efficiency, inevitably some packaging producers may go out of business. Sorry but there it. These things happen.

Less demand will mean less supply and some unwelcome surprises. The myopia I mentioned earlier has already become a by-product of not looking far enough ahead or not devising a survival strategy that we call ‘innovation’. As James Clear says in his book, Atomic Habits, “we’d rather be wrong with others than right by ourselves.”

You don’t have to be the same as everyone else, and change starts with a phone call. To have a chat, please book some time in the room44 diary. It won’t cost you anything and it might change your ideas about surviving in a changing market.

Click here.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

Every day, there’s a new disruptive banking story, a new tech start-up raising millions to change something, someday and the just as regular reporting of start-ups and established firms going under.

On the flip side, and at the same time, Uber loses a founder, WeWork takes a tumble and other unicorns report a year of negative returns and lose their shine. Sometimes, some things are too good to be true.

But you’re alright, because everybody will always need your paper, drugs, water, chocolate, steel work, cosmetics, legal services, financial advice…or will they?

But…

With a properly critical look at your future, at your consumer behaviours and your market, it’s possible to see what’s coming down the line to compete with you. And there will be something on your horizon that will cause some of your older revenue streams to dry up.

Working with teams to create roadmaps to a profitable future, we can find that everything looks great until it’s met with a little less than enthusiasm by the CSuite.

We always make it clear that the output we create together isn’t a plan for someday: the output we generate by working with you is a plan you can use now.

You will define what your business is going to be. You’ll plot your path of baby steps so everyone knows what they must do from the minute they hear the plan.

Forecasts are guesses

As a process, this is an easy one to understand. Pick a point in the future, use radical insight to inform what’s needed for that strategic end point to be viable and plot the product developments that will get you there. As far as ROI is concerned, you’ll have a general impression of size and shape.

However strong your forecasting function is, and we’ll probably disagree on that, they are guessing just as much as you are. Of course they have models and spreadsheets to justify their view of the world, but you have one thing they don’t – and that’s intuition.

This is the magic sauce that could bring your CSuite to the party.

Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘fuzzy front end’ or ‘future forecasting’. What they point to is a future sales figure that amounts to the same thing really: guesswork.

Intuition

Your senior management has been around long enough to get into the CSuite. They’ve worked through cycles of business to achieve the sort of insight that can only come with time served and they know, more often than not, what good looks like.

So, if you can’t get them involved in the actual process of innovation, it’s worth bouncing the odd ball down the board table to see where their interest lies, what sparks their excitement, and where their intuition makes them look.

Awareness vs trust

In the digital marketing rule book, we are told there are three phases to online marketing: awareness, trust and conversion. It’s the same across your business structure and vertically from bottom to top.

Being noticed isn’t the same as being trusted, but getting an innovation concept through the stage gates means tapping into what becomes a reason to believe.

This may sound a bit too much like pragmatism to be true innovation, but innovation ultimately is a matter of commercial survival.

Today, you need a plan. If you don’t know where to start, or how to sell it in to your CSuite, get in touch. We do.

In the meantime, you can download our free guide to ‘Selling innovation into your own company’ here.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.