The Young Hoteliers Summit: A glimpse into BrainStore’s Idea Events
As a company that works with a lot of big organizations, we often don’t get the chance to share the results of our Idea Events. Sometimes we get to talk about specific products and services that came about as a result of working with us – but we rarely get to give people a real glimpse into how our process unfolds.
But today we do! Last month, BrainStore was one of the sponsors of the Young Hoteliers Summit (YHS), a new hospitality conference put on by the Career Club of the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne (an internationally-renowned Swiss hotel school). As part of our contribution to the event, we ran the attendees through our Idea Factory process to come up with solutions to one of the challenges faced by luxury hotels today.
The Young Hoteliers Summit and Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne are graciously allowing us to share all their inspirations, raw ideas, the top 10 finished ideas and the results of their Idea Selection.
So, if you’d like to get a glimpse of the amazing results of one of our Idea Events, read on!
The Challenge
The Jumeirah Group, another sponsor of the event, proposed the following challenge to the attendees of the Young Hoteliers Summit:
“In the face of an overall decrease in demand, how to boost occupancy levels in luxury hotels without pushing prices lower?”
From that challenge, BrainStore developed a series of thought-provoking questions and criteria to come up with 10 great ideas.
The Process
We started by leading the students through one of our Creative Teams. Creative Teams are the part of our process where we do quick, short exercises that result in thousands of “inspirations” rapidly. We call the results of those sessions “inspirations” because – while they might not be a full idea in their own right – each inspiration has the potential to become, or inspire an actual idea later on in our process.
To get those inspirations, we first asked questions that don’t require a lot of thought, but require participants to consider different viewpoints. Those included:
What do millionaires expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?
What do business travelers expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?
What do sporty people expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?
Then we moved onto more challenging questions that require participants to stretch their brains, such as:
How can one positively surprise various customer groups, in a way that leaves a lasting impression?
Imagine you are living in prohibitive times – alcohol has recently been outlawed – You are a wine merchant, and you must now find a way to continue selling your exclusive alcohol despite the ban. How can you do this?
How do get your guests to feel completely comfortable in your hotel? Pay special attention to the five senses.
Through those questions, and the others that we rapid-fired at participants, we gathered over 2500 inspirations!
If you’d like to see the questions we asked and the responses, take a look at our records from the Creative Team:
(FYI, those results are rough – the goal for participants were to get as many inspirations as quickly as possible.)
After the Creative Team, we then moved onto the next part of our process: the Idea City. In the Idea City, BrainStore pushed the YHS participants to combine all the inspirations generated in the Creative Team – and to turn those into fresh new ideas. During this phase, we still give participants challenges to think about, but now they have the time to create concrete ideas.
The ideas generated during this phase ranged from tempting guests with sensory experiences like baking bread in the morning, to providing above-and-beyond services such as adapter plugs (for travelers from different countries), to giving guest the ability to customize their rooms before they even arrive (like rock stars!)
The Idea City is a little more relaxing than the Creative Team – but all the brains in the room were obviously working madly away! We had nearly 500 raw ideas come out of the Idea City.
Take a look at the raw ideas:
The Results
After the crazy inspiration generating of the Creative Team, and the quieter idea-generation of the Idea City, we hung up all the ideas and let the students pick their favorites. This is always a favorite part of the Idea Event because participants get to see the results of their labor. Plus, it’s a lot of fun to see the wide variety of ideas!
Then, we gave the students a little break while we evaluated their top ideas based on criteria and then put the top 10 ideas into a visual format so they could be easily understood and compared with each other.
After that, the Idea Selection began. We turned on some fun music and projected the top 10 ideas in front of the participants from the YHS. It was fun, and quick – with music (of course!) We kept things moving because we didn’t want participants to overanalyze each idea (that comes later in a normal process during the Roadmap workshop) we just wanted to learn their initial impressions.
Meanwhile, in the background, we were crunching the students’ ratings of the ideas to find out what ideas were liked by all, and also which ideas were liked by some and hated by others. (Those polarizing ideas are incredibly important to us!)
And then, in less than a day, it was done! We compiled a document with the top ideas and showed how participants viewed their viability.
If you’d like to see the final results of our Idea Event for the Young Hoteliers Summit, with the top 10 ideas and how the students ranked them, check them out here.
Normally, this wouldn’t be the final stage of our Idea Event. We typically helps companies thoroughly evaluate each idea with the help of experts, and then run a Roadmap workshop where the leaders of the company determine which ideas should be implemented, in what order and what resources/partnerships they need to make it happen.
In that way, we ensure that ideas generated with BrainStore don’t simply disappear into thin air – unlike many ideas that get pushed aside when other commitments get in the way.
But in a short workshop like this one for the Young Hoteliers, the process we described above gave the participants (and their sponsors) a series of great new ideas, a big gain in enthusiasm for solving challenges in their industry and many innovative building blocks and raw ideas to work with in the future.
We hope that you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the BrainStore process!
