The client must own the idea. The market must embrace it. Our process is designed to meet both needs.
Better research and creativity is key to improving business innovation and performance and value. The concept is simple and proven: listen for customer problems and respond with winning products, services and models.
We know that companies are running lean, and employees are often buried under too much work. At the same time, in any project we do, the client must own the idea and the market must embrace it.
So we agree on the best, most efficient, and most powerful format to wrestle with problems, share and refine ideas and agree on solutions.
We engage our clients early in the process to agree on who will make up a team, what problems we will tackle, and how we go about it. Together, we design the best research method for the challenge, agreeing on who has the answers, the questions we will ask, and how we will ask them. Then, as we conduct the research, we debate the findings, adapt to new ideas -- surprises and confirmations -- to ensure that we make the most progress, as fast as possible.
We ask our clients to engage intellectually (as opposed to transactionally) ensuring that they get the most out of the effort, while not complicating their lives and schedules. In this way, our work is open and sized appropriately.
Open
From project start to finish, our open process, called RADCL (Research and Decide Collaboratively), links our clients to learning and people with problems, not just data and Powerpoints, and taps the combined intelligence of teams to solve those problems.
For very small enterprises, customer intimacy is a natural, daily activity - business owners looking across counters. As organizations grow, the basic questions of needs and value are much harder to ask, answer and share. Together with our clients (and no matter the size of the company) we start, re-start and fuel those conversations and use them to create the new concepts needed to gain, or re-gain, leadership.
Scaled
A solution should always be proportional to a problem; a response proportional to a challenge.
Data are needed, but are never the answer. Answers come when clients are engaged, learning quickly, deepening relationships by listening to the right people, asking the right questions and sparking the most creativity from everyone involved.
So we bring a wide, but highly precise range of exploration and creative techniques to find new ideas and new value for clients. The scope of the challenge and level of decision risk determine the design of a project, not a bias toward one technique or another.