Creative proposition development, based on customer empathy, is a 'flow' rather than a fixed process. Off-the-shelf, boxed-up actions lead to off-the-shelf, boxed-up thinking.
The key principles in our approach to the organisational creative process are about opening up, creating opportunities for both conscious 'connective' thinking and feeling, as well as for unconscious incubation of ideas: about customers, about how the organisation can develop customer-inspired propositions, about how these ideas can be implemented effectively.
Our framework consists of the following elements:
- We start with a specific business challenge or opportunity
- We define the mission - objectives for the project - and identify a cross-functional project team
- We run a knowledge mapping workshop to identify the basics - what knowledge about this market currently exists within the organisation
- At lift-off, we coach the innovation team in creative thinking, enabling them to open themselves to opportunity
- We operate a buddy system, coaching each individual innovation team member through the innovation process
- We facilitate the innovation team to develop empathy with customers, through observations, shadowing and interactions
- We allow ideas to incubate
- We run ideation sessions to generate ideas and screen to identify the most achievable and successful
- We elaborate these ideas into more fully formed concepts
- We prototype these ideas, market test them and develop them into final propositions (e.g. new products, services, ways of doing business)