Fresh Takes on Innovation

About two years ago, BrainStore helped the University Hospital of Geneva to come up with a name for a program that the Hospital was initiating based on the recommendations of the World Health Organisations to promote better infection control in hospitals through better hand washing routines.

The name that was created was “VigiGerme®”, litterally translated as “watch out for germs”. On the blog of VigiGerme®, the project owner, Dr. Hugo Sax, explains the background of the program:

VigiGerme® is a non-commercial brand. A piece of social marketing.It’s meant to be viral (infectious). We understand infection control as a product that has to please our prime clients, the healthcare workers. It has to make them look good. To feel good. To fit their intuitive thrive to excel in what they do: to satisfy their clients, the patients. To make them get better, not worse. The name VigiGerme® has been created in a rememberable interdiciplinary creative session with our friends of Brainstore. VigiGerme® is a product of the University of Geneva Hospitals. And it has already infected another hospital, Sint Jan General Hospital, Brugge, Belgium.

There is a video about vigigerme that shows how better infection control works in hospitals:

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!

This fun commercial sent to us from Japan shows people at the moment of inspiration in their everyday lives.

The commercial shows people being inspired in bed, in the park, in the WC, in-transit, at the beach and even in board meetings.

What’s really remarkable about this commercial though is how similar it is to the grumpy thinker who stars in the first part of the presentations we give about BrainStore!

Check out some of our images for where people get ideas:

And, we both have the same conclusions: that it’s much better to be proactive and actively try to get ideas than to just wait for creative inspiration.

Of course, our solutions are a little different!  In the commercial, the solution to lacking inspiration is a stick of gum.  Here at BrainStore, our solution is the Idea Machine – which seems like a much more reliable method of ensuring results!

Have you already heard about shnit? It’s the famous Swiss short film festival. This year, shnit came up with its 6th edition with a firework of short films, covering reams of topics and genres. I had the honour to present a special prize at the shnit Awards Night 2008.

BrainStore’s special prize was an IdeaPackage, worth 30′000 Swiss francs. The winner is Lisa Blatter with her short-film «Nachglühen» (Afterglow) which was chosen to be the best Swiss production in 2008.

Already busy with a new project, she couldn’t appear in person, but was completely overwhelmed when she received the message that her film was chosen. Being asked how she feels and what she is going to do with the prize she answered:

«I’m an observer of beautiful, sad, funny or just spontaneous moments. A collector. But still on search for a story to keep my protagonists grounded. They are still roaming. Together with BrainStore, I’d like to get an impulse for my next major film project.»

BrainStore will help Lisa starting up her next big project. Together we will develop 10 great ideas in a half-day workshop with 12 participants. Cut!

Once again, the versatility of our mobile IdeaFactory was put to the test. After Kuala Lumpur, Düsseldorf and Addis Abeba, its latest mission was Hamburg. Once again, we left Biel to make the seemingly impossible possible.

We captured the Cap San Diego, the largest sea-worthy museum freight ship worldwide, and renamed it without further ado BrainShip. The pop-up feature being part of our mobile IdeaFactory, this proved to be the only right name for the ship.

During two days, we produced ideas for OTTO, the largest mail order business worldwide.

The ship has never seen anything like that before: smoking heads, animated discussions and OTTO’s decision makers racing against teenagers – what a sight!

After these two successful days aboard the Cap San Diego, we’re already planning the next step, the BrainPlane: idea production in the Airbus A 380.

Where our hands brought us to
In the course of history, human beings have changed the world as no other species. Apart from our intelligence, our creativity and our mind, human tools are mostly our two hands. They are the ones executing our intellectual superiority!
Dolphins form the cognitive spearhead in the animal kingdom. Where else would be those cute water mammals today if they had been able to use their resources and to craft tools with their hand-like fins?

Handcraft in the computer age
A modern design studio uses a mixture of precise handcraft and modern computer technique. Black-and-white and color sketches still are done by hand with pen and paper. Once scanned, they can be refined and changed on the computer with an electronic stylus before the drawings of front back and side are processed by the modelers. A team of „sculptors“ then starts to create a clay model.

IdeaFinding by hand
If hands are involved in intuitive idea finding methods, they supply our brain with very many inputs. They boost brain associations in search of new ideas. They are construed to the activation of the unconscious, of knowledge you would not think of. This method is supposed to leave dreary routines. Idea finding by hand activates the potential of entire groups and forms the basis of the following compression phase of the handmade ideas.

The Swiss retailer Coop just launched a brand with 50 convenience food products for swiss teens. The brand and products were created together with BrainStore. We involved the target audience, convenience food specialists, packaging experts and the people from Coop in several workshops.

We learned a great deal about the habits and needs of swiss teenagers when it comes to food. Food needs to be uncomplicated and fun, can be healthy but should not shout about it, low priced without being completely cheap and have a design you want to show around without being too trendy (it’s only food, ok?).

The 50 products include all-time favourites like the giant brownie, energy drink, toast, pizza and donuts, but also new inventions like “planet salad”, a milkshake called “do me a flavour”, “maccaroni & cheese” (very well known in the US but quite new for the young crowd in Switzerland), sweets, smoothies and yoghurt like the “latte macchiato” mix.

Most meals come with an attached cinnamon chewing gum to chew after eating, and the design is very fashionable indeed. “Plan B” is the food that you eat on the go, when you just want to grab a bite and when you want to have some fun with your friends. read more (in German, French or Italian) on the official web site of Coop.

Children do it. If they want to see how something works, they touch it, move it, turn it around. But as we grow older we seem to distance ourselves from haptic understanding. Designers nowadays will happily work solely with computer models to learn about interaction in the real world. At Adobe however, things are changing, as G. Pascal Zachary reports in The New York Times.

Bringing human hands back into the world of digital designers may have profound long-term consequences. Designs could become safer, more user-friendly and even more durable. At the very least, the process of creating things could become a happier one. While working in simulated computer worlds has undeniable appeal, Mr Tulley (crafts trainer for Adobe) says, “the physical act of making things helps the whole person.

At BrainStore we believe that haptic stimulation is vital to trigger unusual inspirations. We will engage the participants of our creative workshops in 3D modeling with play-do, painting with water colors, assembling collages – the creative interaction causing ideas to be conceived and expressed in a completely unexpected way.

And what a party it was! We had great fun last week developing ideas for flying books with Artist Not Vital.

You can find pictures and all the ideas by visiting the special site we have created. Have fun!

Geoffrey Thomas attended the event as a lateral thinker. Read about his unique experience on his blog Group Brilliance.

At the IdeaFactory in Biel, we are today looking for ideas for a flying book. Sounds strange? Swiss artist Not Vital, who works in Switzerland, Africa and the US, had a great idea for an exhibition with flying books. But: How do we make the books fly? We are finding out today with the artist and 50 participants from Switzerland, among them children, teenagers, BrainStore clients and experts in aerodynamics. Come back and visit this blog to find out some of the solutions.