As most business leaders already know – usually all too well – there is far more than enough incremental innovation going on in the world – probably plenty of it right there inside their own organizations. And while they understand the necessity for doing this – to enable the business to capture as much value as possible from its current portfolio – they also realize that this will not get them past today. It has no value in terms of setting them up for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. It gives them, unfortunately, only a limited amount of runway. At some point, that runway is going to run out. And when it does, they had better be prepared for tomorrow.
What they need – if they are to be prepared – are fresh new product & service concepts that are capable of capturing tomorrow (and possibly even the day after tomorrow) for when it becomes today... concepts that look beyond current market demands (sources of pull) and current technology limitations (sources of push) and instead consider what solutions will be right for where their markets are headed in the future, as well as what emerging technologies will allow them to do in that context. This is crucial if they are to be prepared for tomorrow, for in most cases they must start working on defining and exploring these concepts today if in fact they are to be ready for tomorrow when it finally does arrive.
Yet this can be an extremely daunting task. It requires considerable skill – and some degree of imagination – to do well.
Even in those cases where the business has set up a dedicated function tasked with studying this, they quite often come up empty-handed – usually as a result of heavy industry myopia they find themselves saddled with. Consequently, they simply cannot bring themselves to think like new startups do – with completely fresh new eyes and a fresh new sheet of paper, together with plenty of helpful naïveté about their industry.
And so they find themselves in need of help. They need an expert facilitator that is capable of leading their team in coming up with completely new product & service concepts with completely fresh eyes.
This is where Legacy Innovation Group comes in. Via our Product & Service Concepting Workshop, we lead business teams through the art of conceiving impactful and fresh new product & service concepts – quite often concepts they never would have dreamt up on their own. The goal of this workshop is to lead the team in conceiving several new product or service concepts that they can then begin researching and developing further on their own. These workshops are conducted in stages — 6 – 7, depending on the goal.
In Stage 1 of the workshop, we begin by having the group talk about today's current problems (in the scope of what we care about), and why those problems exist as they do.
In Stage 2, we lead the group in surveying today's current product & service solutions. We examine each one of these, and in that context talk about what it is, what it does, and how it works.
In Stage 3, we move on to having the group talk about tomorrow's problems. We discuss the nature of these problems and what signals we have that are telling us these will in fact be tomorrow's problems. We then discuss the specific ways in which tomorrow's problems differ from today's problems – what is it about them that is fundamentally different. We finish this discussion by agreeing that today's solutions cannot solve for tomorrow's problems, and once we have done that, we say goodbye to today's solutions and put them out of our sight and out of our minds (we literally throw physical samples into a garbage can to psychologically reinforce this point).
This brings us to Stage 4 of the workshop – our re-casting stage – a critical precursor to being able to move into the brainstorming activity of the next stage. Here in this stage (and this is where the real art comes in), we create for the group a pseudo-fictitious future scenario (partly utopian and partly dystopian) which we then challenge the group to place themselves into. These scenarios are designed to completely shake up how the group thinks about their business and its industry, and thus scramble their current mental models of how these work, so that they can in fact abandon whatever it is they have previously believed about them. As such, these scenarios make all of their existing presuppositions completely null & void, so that they can no longer rely on them as the basis for conceiving new solutions. Having done this – having placed the group into this completely new and foreign scenario – we then bring them back into tomorrow's problem, but now framed inside of this new and foreign scenario. This sets the stage for the group being able to break out of their previous mental barriers and reach out toward new solutions that they otherwise would have never reached out toward.
Once we have transfixed the group into this totally new frame of mind, we then move them into the heart of the workshop – Stage 5 – where we will lead the group in brainstorming new solutions together. In this exercise – keeping our new, foreign scenario constantly in front of us and fresh in our minds – we begin to brainstorm completely new product & service concepts that hold the potential for solving these new problems in this new and foreign context.
When finished with the brainstorming session, we then enter into Stage 6 of the workshop, where we lead the group in harvesting out of their brainstorming those concepts and themes they find most exciting and most compelling. We then begin working as a group toward defining these concepts and themes further with additional details – adding whatever the group believes will bring additional clarity to what they had in mind. These more fully-defined concepts and themes are what we will then task the group to return back to their offices with to engage in further research and development on — understanding now that they will be working on these fresh new solutions for tomorrow's problems within whatever context and framework the future happens to present them with, and that they are no longer hamstrung with their prior industry limitations, as these new solutions may very well represent radical departures from those, and thus radically new directions for the business to pursue.
When finished, the group will walk away with a completely new set of breakthrough product & service solutions that it can then develop and validate further.
Product & Service Concepting Workshops are typically staged as 3 day events, and can be held in any place of your choosing.
If desired, we can expand the workshop into a Comprehensive Product & Service Concepting Workshop, by including in it Stage 7 – a development and proof session.
Here, for each concept or theme that is to be further developed, we guide the group in creating a relatively detailed development plan for designing and developing the new solution, a relatively detailed prototyping plan for prototyping the solution, and a relatively detailed testing plan for validating the solution. This typically results in a proof-of-concept prototype that can be used to validate the solution enough to justify its more complete development, potentially moving it toward full commercialization. In some cases, we will also lead the group in developing a pilot plan designed to prove out the viability of the concept on a broader commercial and technical basis.
Comprehensive Product & Service Concepting Workshops (incorporating both the upfront concepting work and the subsequent planning work) typically require approximately one week to complete, and can be held in any place of your choosing.
The Product & Service Concepting Workshop Engagement typically follows these steps:
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