Innovation Services—Worldwide Interactive Innovation

  • Innovation Services
    Innovation Imperative
    An organization’s ability to survive depends on its capacity to adapt and innovate. Companies must creatively adjust to changing markets, changing technologies, changing economics, changing competitors, and changing consumer habits and preferences.
 
New Product Concepts, and More

While the primary purpose of innovation and ideation is the development of new product concepts, the same processes, methods, and techniques can also create:

  • New service concepts
  • New branding strategies
  • New customer experiences
  • New brand names
  • New positioning concepts
  • New promotion ideas
  • New packaging ideas
  • New display and point-of-sale ideas
 
Consumer-Driven, Idea-Centric Creativity

At Decision Analyst, the creative process starts with its online community of individuals who are exceptionally creative. The Imaginators®, Decision Analyst's creativity community of consumers and business/trade professionals, is composed of everyday people who have been tested for high levels of “idea-centric creativity”—the ability to generate large numbers of highly original ideas for new products, new services, and other marketing initiatives. Imaginators must pass Decision Analyst’s proprietary test for idea-centric creativity. Imaginators rank in the top 2% to 4% of the general population in terms of idea-centric creative abilities.

Ideation Sessions

Decision Analyst’s ideation sessions are fast-paced, energetic, and fun. They involve creativity exercises, games, associations, unstructured environments (no tables or chairs), spider mapping, guided visualizations, and a variety of proprietary techniques developed by Decision Analyst. These collaborative ideation techniques help stimulate the natural creativity and innovative spirit of the Imaginators.

The most creative ideas often take a while to surface, or they develop as a result of several smaller ideas coming together through Imaginators’ collaboration. The more time participants have to think about a problem and build on the ideas put forward by others, the more likely it is that highly creative ideas will emerge. For this reason, ideation sessions are conducted over relatively long periods of time. Online ideation sessions can extend over a period of 3 to 5 days, while in-person sessions last about 8 hours.

Applied Creativity Process®

Decision Analyst’s Applied Creativity Process® is different from traditional innovation methods. This process is based on a problem-solving, Socratic-inquiry model, with sessions following a proprietary creativity guide that is objectives-driven and exercises-oriented, rather than discussion-based. This guide provides the subtle direction critical to generating highly unique and relevant ideas. A typical 3- to 5-day online session yields 500 to 600 ideas and idea fragments, and a daylong, in-person session generates a similar number of ideas and idea fragments. These collective ideas and idea fragments are stimulants and starting points to help the Innovation Team create viable new product concepts.

Employee-Driven Ideation

Decision Analyst uses its Applied Creativity Process® to help companies tap into the creativity and expertise of their own employees for generating innovative ideas and solutions. This process:

  • Helps participants clearly define the objectives and goals of the project.
  • Generates a large number of possibilities, ideas, or potential solutions (many more ideas than traditional brainstorming techniques).
  • Provides sound, logical rationale for new product concepts presented to internal stakeholders.
  • Promotes implementation and encourages acceptance of the ultimate solutions within the organization.
 

These ideation sessions can be conducted online or on-site.

Concept Development

Once the ideation sessions are completed, Decision Analyst’s Innovation Team sorts through, combines, and builds on the raw ideas generated during the ideation sessions to develop a set of first-stage concepts. There concepts include working names, written descriptions of features and benefits, and supporting ideas and illustrations (as needed). Then comes a first-stage concept review with the client to identify the concepts that warrant further development. The selected concepts go through a small qualitative review (typically 12 to 20 depth interviews) to identify how each concept could be improved. Each new concept is then enriched, polished, and honed until it is complete, accurate, and understandable to the target audience. The primary deliverables are ready-to-test, new product concepts.

Why Decision Analyst

Decision Analyst has been involved in new products and new services concept development for more than four decades. The firm has helped develop electronic educational toys, electronic games, cell phones, customer loyalty programs, retail environments, and numerous new food, beverage, and household products. With its innovation processes, Decision Analyst can bring transformational change to your new product development efforts.

Innovation Services

For more information on our Innovation Services, please contact Gretchen Riskind, Director of Innovation/Ideation (griskin@decisionanalyst.com), or Clay Dethloff, Senior Vice President of Insights and Innovation (cdethlo@decisionanalyst.com). Both can be reached at 1-817-640-6166.