Immense amounts of time and effort have been exerted in reducing the product development cycle with the widespread adoption of lean development methodologies, computer aided design, virtual analysis, rapid prototyping and tooling. However, whilst these have brought products to market quicker, the greatest challenge still remains how to identify the lucrative product concepts to fuel the development pipeline.
The pitfall of many front-end innovation approaches has been their failure to generate meaningful insights and to translate these into valuable opportunities. Although existing programmes have brought marketing and technical functions together, they are often unsuccessful at providing a sufficiently stimulating environment and collective vision. As a result members often retrench, with marketers envisioning great products that break the laws of physics and R&D generating great new technology-driven product features with questionable consumer value. To overcome this failing PA has developed FutureWorlds.
FutureWorlds uses a series of collectively built future scenarios to facilitate the team’s understanding of how the future could unfold and to generate insights into consumers’ desires that new products can deliver against. The contrasting nature of the scenarios forces the team to generate diverse concepts based on the differing needs of each world, rather than their own personal singular vision. Once a dialogue has been established around these worlds, it is easier for the group to exchange their ideas, providing a common reference point from which to debate.
As a springboard for the ideation sessions it is particularly important to bring the worlds to life. The group needs to get deeply immersed in each world and the needs/desires of consumers in these spaces. We have a number of techniques to achieve high levels of realism, going further than richly articulated written description and graphical depictions to create a strongly evocative environment for concept generation and evaluation. We have found that these shared references are extremely liberating, allowing members to role-play into different consumers’ situations rather than giving their own job-centred view. The polar nature of the differing worlds helps force the group to produce radically new solutions to the desires/needs identified in each of the worlds.
For each promising idea, the team completes a FutureWorlds summary, capturing the essence of the concept from both technical and marketing perspectives and linking it back to the drivers from the world. These ‘one-pagers’ are cross-tabulated to highlight product concepts that appear in several worlds as these have an increased likelihood of success whichever future unfolds. Technologies that make multiple appearances may need further investigation to establish their feasibility, or whether there are alternative ways to deliver the same benefits.
From this point the now traditional rapid product development process can take over, with some concepts fitting neatly into existing pipelines, whilst others might require completely new brands or divisions to be established to ensure success. FutureWorlds provides a robust process for the identification of breakout opportunities and the translation of these into concepts to feed the development pipeline.
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For further information call +44 1763 267492 or e-mail: innovation@paconsulting.com
