Innovation, Archives

When I’m successful in persuading a previously closed mind of the value in looking to the future for inspiration and idea stimulus, it’s always a moment to celebrate.

Having the energy and tenacity is our part of the deal: to keep looking forward, to keep seeing value in things that don’t immediately appear promising – to see the future that other people can’t yet see. Clients just have to turn up and be willing to drop their barriers to entry – the practical matters that mire a company in the here and now.

It takes time. Clients need time to trust me and I need to keep them interested long enough to make a breakthrough.

Now and then we get lucky quickly and an idea meets a moment when eyes sparkle and everyone says “hell, yeah.”

Are you the project?

The part in this that we don’t sell, but which occurs as a by-product of being open to new ideas, is that our client always develops a new perspective.

‘What are you working on?’ is a line I stole (like an artist) from a book called ’Show your work’ https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/ ?

It’s one of a few books I return to when I’m looking for another way to explain what we’re here for.

Innovation is a process, not a workshop.

Regularly turning up to hear, explore and consider external suggestions is not something that enough business leaders do. In fact, it’s not something enough of us do generally.

Whenever I get a fancy to start a new thing I’m accused of having another mid-life crisis. In reality my decisions to open an eBike shop and start a sustainable clothing brand were both the outcomes of years watching things develop around me until I felt the time was right to step up.

Again, from a book – “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” (John Cleese)

So, ‘what are you working on?’ is my adopted mantra for myself.

This screen grab from Austin Kleon’s book explains why it is so much fun to take time to consider the unnavigable journey into the future. It can be exciting, thought-provoking and sometimes terrifying but it’s a journey I believe we all need to take.

My role is to make it possible over a different path than you may choose for yourself.

Let me know if you fancy trying it out.

Check us out here.

No one is ever going to accuse me of being prudent

I’ve never saved enough or made enough AVC payments and doubt that my pension will amount to a comfortable retirement.

I’m the complacent child of the lucky generation who have had comfortable retirements from final salary, index-linked pensions and who, to my mind have largely spent too much time, managing cash they didn’t actually earn.

If you aren’t over 45 or studied economics, this might not make much sense and I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of it.

What I can claim is a certain caution in sensing when things aren’t quite right.

We built room44 on this tendency and created a business that looks at converging and emerging trends to see where opportunities and threats lie.

Grab an emerging trend

You may have done very well out of COVID. Some companies did. In honesty, room44 didn’t. A consultancy, that works in a notional future, found it hard to gain client confidence when no-one knew if Boris was blowing hot or cold on any given day.

Happily, a couple of years beforehand we’d taken trend insight into our own hands and created a plan that resulted in us opening an electric bike business too. When one thing fell off a cliff, the other one climbed it and things balanced out.

What we did was the effect of seeing a change in a market, taking definite action and trusting our own skill and judgement.

Today, both businesses work which is why this is timely.

There’s another pinch point right around the corner

Already we know business costs are going to get a lot higher this year and into next. You may be carrying bounce-back loans as an extra debt and that nice Mr. Sunak has already told us that he’s increasing corporation tax by 6% in April 2023 – your corporation tax.

It won’t hurt immediately but it’s on the books.

Inflation is nudging 10% and we can cite any number of price increase stories – from wood to micro-chips – that far exceed 10%.

The good news is that there is more than enough time to get creative and look at new ideas to generate diverse revenues.

Your choices are to sell more, sell for more or get creative and trust your own skill and judgement.

If you want a bit of help to see where the opportunities lie, let’s talk. Book some time with me here.

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

In social media feeds, almost daily, someone is promoting the transition to electric vehicles. Some responses may be less enthusiastic, but it’s also possible that we’ve forgotten why the change is inevitable.

Reasons for not buying an EV today are usually centred around convenience and range:

“…the main thing stopping me from jumping on the electric car craze is a lack of supporting infrastructure like charging points. I don’t feel like I can go away for the week or a long weekend and ask the hotel/AirBnB host if they’d mind me just plugging in my car…”

The immediate preference to avoid extra cost or an increase in involvement in journey planning is understandable. It’s not something we’re used to and, for full transparency, I haven’t fully switched to an EV yet. I ride an eBike and leave my vehicle behind as often as I can.

Why are we doing this at all?

The focus of the EV conversation has become the individual cost to us as users. What we’ve mostly lost sight of is why we are making the change. Cognitive dissonance that has slipped between what we need to do and why we must do it.

It needs calling out – again and again.

This week, Sydney, Australia, recorded its highest ever night-time temperature at 25.4ºC.
Global wildfires hit a record number in 2019. 2020 has beaten that by 13% already.
Through melt water and expansion, sea levels are rising at the rate of 3.3mm a year. If you don’t understand why it matters, please make it your business to read around the subject. It does.

Listen and learn

The excellent podcast How to Save the Planet asks, how do we adapt to changes that are already inevitable? It’s a great question and it picks up on other madness, such as non-transport related planning policy allowing building development in flood plains, simply because the effect has not been felt yet.

How to Save the Planet cites a study showing that “Miami Beach could be mostly underwater within eighty years, but construction of new beachfront properties is booming.” Miami isn’t alone in this.

We all make our choices based on what’s important to us on that day. COVID has taught us that things change, and quickly. 2020 has given us new versions of normal literally overnight. Suggestions that a return to mass attended events can be looked forward to next year now send a shudder through most of us who look at a concert crowd and wonder how we’ll feel like going to that kind of event again.

Borrowed from the same podcast, and included as an essay on the subject of climate change and the Miami construction paradox, Heaven or High Water, by Sarah Miller, contains the line, “I’m afraid of dying, sure, but so far it hasn’t been an issue.” Cognitive dissonance in all its glory.

Back to you and your next car

Like selling a future scenario that means a company must change how it operates, selling a thus far unexperienced event isn’t easy. As a consultancy, room44 faces this all the time.

The reason we’re heading down a road that will see lives lived differently, very soon, is not because it’s good for our pocket. It’s because we must all make an individual effort to reduce our own impact on the environment, to slow down the rate at which the world is warming.

Buying an EV is a bit like changing your unhealthy diet to a better one. If you don’t do it, you just have to live in hope that nothing bad happens.

The switch away from internal combustion engines is inevitable. And if it’s inevitable in 2030, it’s necessary now. Like a lot of things in life, we are all good at putting off what we know needs to happen in favour of a short-term convenience.

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

#howtosavetheplanet #allwecansave #sarahmiller #alexblumberg #ayanaelizabethjohnson #trends #environment #climatechange #electricvehicles #ecargobikes

The way a business evolves from start-up to demise is trackable through a cycle that has strong parallels in nature. Stepping back and seeing the similarities is a useful exercise and shows a set of practices that can help you avoid some repeated pit falls.

Mega trends

This is one example. The planet is seeing a noticeable increase in wildfires. Not so long ago, such fires were a problem but not always devastating for humans. That’s changed. But wildfires are a necessary part of the ecosystem: they clear away detritus and let new plants see the sky with room to grow.

Caught in the fire zone…

OR – how planning restrictions, self-interest and a poor understanding of environment have conspired to push nature into a corner, and how she is fighting back.

Towns go through a cycle of early growth to reach a high density of population. People need places to live, so an increase in building creates homes for lots of people. As prosperity rises, people prefer not to live on top of each other, so they begin to push out of the town boundaries and into open space. We know these areas as the suburbs.

Parts of the world have drier areas around towns than others. In the UK, our forests are pretty damp, so fire doesn’t often occur, but in other parts of the world, such as California, it’s much drier.

At the time of writing, the USA has 63 wildfires burning, affecting over 38 million acres of land https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm. That’s a lot of fires, affecting a lot of people, and science tells us that the conditions are linked to climate change led by man-made pollution.

Creating the right conditions

As housing development pushes out from town centres, rules are created to protect the environment for its residents; often these restrict property height. This limits the number of families living on a single plot and so urban sprawl continues.

Human development means nature must also be managed. Firebreaks are built into city design, and trees and other flora are cultivated: this is the point of Wildland/Urban Interface (WUI) – where nature meets housing. Historically this area was undeveloped but, as homes are needed, it has been adopted and built on.

Nature, however, doesn’t stop doing what nature does and so, seasonally trees shed leaves and old wood, which forms layers of detritus circling towns and cities. This keeps building until temperature conditions create the perfect opportunity for fires to thrive – and the store of combustible materials is ripe for burning. And it does.

Managed Retreat

People who are newly switched on to the risks of fire destroying their homes and businesses are entering into a period of managed retreat: a process of moving away from danger zones. Funding for such retreats falls to the home owner and, clearly, not everyone has the means to facilitate this. So houses are being abandoned, or simply left deserted after they’ve burned to the ground, and their owners must start again, the value of their investment in bricks and mortar lost.

The above process describes a set of uncontrollable changes that have a direct effect on homeowners: climate change and long-standing development practices building up a body of accumulated waste that eventually brings the house down.

Your fire line

After a successful period of selling a product or service, inevitably customer preferences move on, a business is left trying to sell its old offering and the conditions in which it operates all move beyond its control. This is when it gets burned.

The average lifecycle of a business today is around 15 years, so you may have survived more than one cycle already, either through good luck or great foresight. But even your previously accurate foresight may need to change to adapt to the new world order.

Design thinking

Our tool of choice is design thinking. It’s a pretty straightforward process, but can be harder to execute. As we’ve said in the past, design thinking is like climbing a 50-foot rope and ringing a bell: simple to understand, much harder to do.

So, call in some expert rope climbers

This is what room44 does. We see your problem from a different perspective – and we walk you through the design thinking process so that you can develop customer-facing strategies that will provide the things they are looking to buy today.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do. Get in touch here: helpme@room44.co.uk

Times are tough and nothing is as it was, so it’s understandable that brands are taking a long, hard look at what they do next. We get that.

But when you write to us, or occasionally call, to say, ‘We’re planning an ideation session/hackathon/creative competition and are inviting proposals to explain how room44 would run such a process and what outcomes we can expect’ – we know you’re struggling, want ideas for nothing – and more importantly – may not actually know what you want. There it is.

Let’s get down to what’s going on here.

We don’t really mind that you ask for ideas and we know that you’ll get a response from some companies. But, be honest; if you wrote to us because you found us through a keyword match in LinkedIn, we’ll probably never talk regardless of how much time we invest in your problem.

Practically, we can’t begin to write your proposal until we know what your problem is, so why not just call (Zoom/Teams/Facetime/Skype/WhatsApp) first. Let’s get the first conversation done, so you’ve had a chance to explain who you want to work with, what is needed and why we’re being asked to pitch.

Make it meaningful.

To write a meaningful proposal takes time. If all you get back from your generic ‘we want’ email is a templated process chart with your company name dropped in, then be aware – that agency knows as much about you as you do about them.

Because a proposal takes time to create and will be followed by at least two more conversations and one more iteration of the detail, we’re going to ask you to pay us for that time.

What? How dare we?! Who does that?

Anybody with any self-respect is who.

Do you honestly think we’re going to lay out our process and study your issues to make our project plan meaningful for nothing? Sorry, but no.

This is what happens too often.

Client tells us broadly the questions they want answers to.
We pitch.
Client takes our process and try to run it themselves.
It doesn’t work.
Client Management questions the value of an agency.
Nothing changes.

See the problem? To apply a creative process that we have learnt over years, is our job.

To match the process to a unique treatment that we have developed and to lead your team through a work plan that will result in creative options for you to pursue is the most important part of the work we do.

This is our speciality and we don’t expect it to be yours. Nor should your boss.

When room44 sends out a proposal, it is tailored to your need and includes examples of innovation from business segments that you could transpose straight in. We show our working out and we demonstrate how the project will run, who you need to commit to it, what the time investment will be and why the outcomes demand more than just a PO to move you to the position you want to get to.

So, again:

Will we send you a templated process chart? No.
Will we pitch without talking? No.
Will we spend time making your proposal very precise? Yes.
Will we do it for nothing? Well, maybe, but if we pitch at all we’ll have had that conversation first too.

I’m not being unreasonable here. I’m happy to send a case study that describes previous successes. We’ve got loads of those and you can ring the clients for references if you want to. But we won’t commit time to you until you’ve offered some commitment to us.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, it means we don’t know each other well enough and that comes down to talking. So please, let’s talk. That part is free.

Here’s my number. Any time works. +44 208 123 9018.

The next few months are impossible to predict and therefore difficult to plan, so think different. Blend specialism with generalism.

When I got my first job, the first thing my bank did was send me a credit card: instant debt. So I started to run my finances like many FDs run those of their company: manage borrowings by cutting the cost line and growing the top line.

It took me a long time to realise that I didn’t have to chase after every sales incentive I could see. All I had to do was stop using the card. In other words, see the blindingly obvious – work out a budget and follow it through.

What had made things difficult for me were the unexpected expenses, not least of which was a 15% mortgage rate. But this is what passes for financial control in more businesses than perhaps we all realise.

Q4 2020 – Q1 2021

The next few months are impossible to predict. We’re told that the world is falling apart and yet we’re still expected to keep businesses alive and kicking. Some sectors will inevitably find this easier than others; many are already feeling the squeeze.

So, are the unexpected things that could throw your plan off-course really unexpected?

Let’s have a look at that.

COVID-19 is expected to flare up again as the weather gets cooler. This will have consequences: international travel will dry up again, domestic travel will be harder as public transport has reduced capacity, online shopping will continue to grow – high street visits can’t recover when we can’t go out.

Don’t forget the flu either. The NHS always sees a winter spike in demand. This year could be exceptional.

These are real and present dangers facing most business sectors. Although we might assume that service industries such as accountancy and law might escape, no-one is immune. If contracts aren’t being signed or deals done, accountants don’t win clients. If courts aren’t open, solicitors can’t act for clients. And a similar story will play out elsewhere.

The massive shift to homeworking has shown us that commuting isn’t essential. As a result, people working at home have begun to move away from cities and into towns and villages. Rental values in cities are already dropping in commercial and residential sectors, while rental values and house prices in less populated areas are doing OK. These sorts of connections can be made across many industries.

How about some other big factors?

In November the US goes to the polls. In December the UK leaves the EU. Both of these events have direct impact on the UK’s trading future. Brexit is a turning point in the UK’s economic history that few are prepared to look upon as a good idea and, whatever the eventual outcome, this winter looks like supply chains are going to be stretched. Don’t forget, the Chinese New Year happens in February. Another bump in the road.

Then there’s the weather. More floods are forecast this winter than we saw at the beginning of 2020. Rising water levels have been a known phenomenon for years, but many flood defences still aren’t adequate and planners haven’t stopped granting development permission on flood plains.

The blindingly obvious is a bit uncomfortable to consider, and I know this is a list of possible doom and gloom, but the fact is that many of us choose to keep doing what we’ve become used to doing despite what common sense tells us.

What to do

Think different. Blend specialism with generalism.

Your specialism is what you do. Ours is what we do. What we do is everything you don’t.

If you want to explore why house rents and the numbers of commuters might affect you, as just one example, please pick up the phone or email to book an initial conversation.

It’ll cost you nothing and it may lead to a great partnership and a new strategic view.

Working together, you’ll benefit from ideas and insight that we will deliver in a way that helps your team plan a radical response to disruption.

The plan that will follow our process will not only make the radical completely reasonable, it will give you options to switch to if the unexpected events written into your strategy actually come to pass.

It’s a big promise and it’s a big job. Are you prepared to take it on? We are. Book a call now.

Future thinking. Future proofing. 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

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller*

When a crisis, calamity or catastrophe hits, you can be sure of one thing: there’ll be a load of advice about what to do next. This will often be from people who talk in platitudes and generalisations, and who don’t have your particular problems.

It’s always easier to see the problem objectively from the side-lines than being stuck in the middle of it. But while you’re trying to regain control of what used to be your ‘normal’, this sideline advice is all too easy to ignore.

The future was always going to be different

The problem here is that the future was always going to be different to today, and you were always going to have to respond by being courageous and creative. It’s just that the level of courage required has gone up.

The truth is, nothing changes by looking at it, so you have to be the difference.

The COVID-era

COVID-19 has launched us all into a world of WTF happens next, when we’re still in the middle of WTF do we do now?

We’re not immune to this at room44. Only three weeks after we launched our new eBike business, and while our city centre partners can’t keep up with demand from commuters trying to avoid public transport, out in the provinces these issues aren’t felt in the same way – yet.

In fact, while carbon emissions are reported to have dropped by 60% in city centres, there is a growing sense that the only way to stay away from other people is to cocoon oneself in a car when the movement restrictions lift. It’s going to take a pretty determined attitude to fork out £2k+ for a decent bike to get to work, when you’ve already got a car on the drive.

Two sides to every story

But, as with every story, there are two sides to this one. Limited access to city parking is going to make your life pretty difficult if everyone drives themselves to work. Traffic will increase again and air quality targets will mean local authorities will need, once more, to encourage you out of your car. How will they do this? By raising parking charges and restricting parking spaces. The answer: get yourself a bike.

Immunity

Have you noticed that, just this week, news media have started saying ‘immunity, while it lasts’?

As with everything, COVID-19 is expected to mutate and because we know so little about it, the level of immunity, from becoming infected and getting over it, is limited, maybe. Watch this space.

Here are a few more readings from trends that you can ponder while locked-down. If these help you to see the world we’re heading into differently, please ‘like’ the article so your colleagues and contacts can see it too.

Air Travel

Air travel after lockdown is likely to be very different than before COVID-19. Companies must now consider the health and safety of travelling staff in the context of risk of infection. Working from home has provided everybody with the perfect conditions to monitor the experiment, and guess what? People can be trusted to be productive when not in direct line of sight, and IT is enabling closer monitoring too. The absolute need for a face-to-face meeting has been re-evaluated, so fewer business trips will be necessary.

Fewer planes in the air, fewer pilots in cabins, fewer cabin crew working, fewer ground staff, luggage handlers…if you work in the aviation industry, now could be a good time to consider retraining.

Choose your travel like a 12-year-old

When you were a kid, you could travel four ways: get a lift, ride a bike, catch a bus (or a train), or walk. This is how our transport options are looking for the future too. Terms like shared and multi-modal are coming soon to a vernacular near you.

After lockdown, you can always revert to the way things were and go with the flow until there is no other option. That’s your choice.

High streets will become local again

We may all rush out to eat again in town centres after physical distancing restrictions lift – for a while. Then we may wonder why we’re running the risk of contracting COVID-19 (it isn’t going anywhere for a while yet) and high street restaurants and coffee shops will shut down, while other local and regional speciality outlets will thrive.

Fewer planes moving masses of homogeneous packaging and less shopper inclination to visit interchangeable retailers will allow speciality stores to find an audience. Less moving of food around the world will help locally produced, seasonal foods step into the spotlight. It may end up being more expensive, but perhaps we’ve now reached the point at which food should cost what it costs to grow, and not what it is subsidised to be sold at. Perhaps we’re looking at a brighter future when the norm is that we can’t get strawberries out of season, all our cauliflowers come from Cornwall, and our pork from Suffolk.

The miracle of globalisation has lost its shine

If you work in a business that manufactures in China or India, you know that you are hostage to the supply chain. When COVID-19 happened, your supply chain failed.

Solution: shorten the supply chain, retake control of your production and get to know your production partners so you can call in a favour.

Effect: production comes back to the EU and US and others. Market countries start to rebuild vocational industries.

Can this really happen? Those tuned into economic modelling seem to think so.

Furlough leads to Universal Basic Income

It’s possible that, where industries and companies have failed through COVID-19, governments may introduce a basic income. This will shift the measurement of an individual’s value to society from the value of their output, in terms of a wage received, to one of measuring their consumption – how they choose to spend their funded support, and how they top it up.

UBI may only move people from an existing social benefits structure and income support to a different fund name but, if attitudes shift, it could become an acceptable alternative to the 9 to 5. Gig-economy workers may see the sense in this and, after the first phase of COVID-19 has played out, there are likely to be many more of those.

Less work to do

Considering UBI also prepares society for a time (not too distant) when robots and AI have succeeded in reducing the number of people needed in the workplace.

Who pays? Good question. Logically, we could ask the robotics infrastructure industry to compensate displaced workers, or newly rejuvenated manufacturing to contribute. Just ideas.

Delivery gets multi-layered

In this unprecedented** time, you can order every consumer good you want and it’ll arrive in 48 hours, but you can’t buy flour and you definitely can’t easily see a doctor. You can thank the God of Home Delivery, Amazon, or think again.

The people who are getting you the things you need, who aren’t prepared to give up to Amazon, are the local and small businesses who have adapted. The guys with a deli down the road or the bakery in the high street you can call to get a delivery next day are the ones we should be thanking. Support local.

When the chips are down and chips are all you want, Amazon won’t be there for you the way the local fryer has always been.

Work security

Jobs that were gold-plated like air crew, retail buyers, baristas and GPs look a bit less secure. Service provision that has shone through during lock-down, like small food producers, online health services, delivery drivers and, dare I say, eBike delivery riders are not going to fade away. Job-security has been a declining concept for years and, now more than ever, people are realising that their trust in larger corporations might need a rethink.

The trends we’ve listed here have some inter-relation. They are suggestions of a degree of change that is happening now.

How much these changes will affect you remains broadly in your hands.

To some degree they will come to bear on your life whatever you do. You can consciously try to modify your behaviours after the peak of COVID-19, or you can resist.

________________________________________

Many of these will be changes for good. Less airborne pollution has such a wide range of environmental and health benefits that it’s hard to see why we would allow it to reoccur.

‘Nothing changes by looking at it’ – and the least painful route forward is to take responsibility to change now. Trying to go back to how things were is going to be frustrating, expensive, and probably doomed to fail.

Better to devise a new set of behaviours while you have the time to think.

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

*Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist.

** This ‘unprecedented’ time is relative. The world has seen population-changing epidemics and pandemics before and the intervals are surprisingly regular. The decisions you make today will have a direct effect on the health and well-being of your grandchildren – and that must be worth thinking about.

At the risk of repeating myself to regular readers, the secret to being a successful innovator is as simple as climbing a 50ft rope and ringing a bell.

And just like climbing the rope, innovation is really simple to understand and really hard to do.

The answer? Figure out where they’re going and get there first.

First off

Trying to ‘know’ anything about the future is a fool’s errand. If we haven’t learnt that recently, we probably never will.

Secondly

Working out what you must do to meet a need that hasn’t yet been identified is tough. The best we can do maybe to make an educated guess.

Anyone’s best guess may be the ideas that look like they have the highest probability of succeeding.

That may be 100% more than the competition is doing and, if you don’t stop doing it, some of the time you’ll be right.

How do you start to figure out where your customers are probably going – so you can get there first?

Get some help
Look for clues
Record trends
Do it every day/week/month and…
get used to thinking about your future

How do we work?

We future think
We work with you to develop a future-proofing strategy
We’re here to help you start to innovate

You can see our VP here and book time to talk here.

It’s that easy.

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.