“Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.“
— Will Rogers
Discovery
Drive strategy into design decisions
Your company is a complex machine fueled by the collective individual understanding of your corporate competencies and your strategy. Discovering how to enable your employees to merge the two and identify and define where the opportunities are is the first step. Then you can begin to shift into deciding what direction to take and drive design decisions to pursue the opportunities in front of you.
Research
Fuel design thinking
We view research as having the end goal of providing direction and fueling design thinking. By definition, research is “creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humans, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications.“ At Drive Strategy, we take this to heart. We start with historical knowledge as a base and apply data analytics, cognitive models and co-creation workshops, and look at existing research in new ways to uncover opportunities. We also design and execute custom research to fill in the gaps when needed.
Insights
Achieve alignment and design direction
To be actionable, there must be alignment as to what an insight is. At Drive Strategy we define an insight as a “consumer/customer truth that can help build business.” Insights must be comparable, testable and powerful. We utilize research and co-creation workshops to develop them, and we write them as:
I [statement of fact] because [reason why], but [tension]. And we test them to determine which provide the biggest business-building opportunity. Insights provide the direction needed to generate new ideas and/or evaluate and modify existing ideas.Validation
Fine-tune and hit the road
At Drive Strategy, we don’t start with the ideas; we view idea generation as being the validation of having strong insights. With validated insights in hand, idea generation becomes easier, more efficient and more effective. Once ideas are developed that solve for the insight, then they can be developed into concepts, tested, optimized and managed within an innovation portfolio.
Execution
Hit on all cylinders
The journey does not stop with having great ideas that you know your consumer/customer wants. Where the rubber meets the road is in securing the resources needed (the right people, dedicated time, allocated money), ensuring the idea passes through the required gate, and making sure operations can keep things moving forward.