Fresh Takes on Innovation

A few weeks ago, BrainStore organised a conference about the future for one of our clients. The goal was to give 120 people from this organisation the chance to reflect on the future, to get a sense of urgency and to trigger a desire for immediate action. Because, believe it or not, the Future is approaching with considerable speed, and as companies and organisations we need to ready ourselves for it.

To achieve this goal, BrainStore created an exhibit about the future at the Idea Factory in Biel and invited the participants to go through this exhibit, to write down statements about the future that are relevant to the company, and, based on those statements, to draft future scenarios for the company. Based on the best-rated scenario, they formulated commitments for the different departments of the company. The participants left the Idea Factory with a clear sense of what the future will bring and what they need to do as an organisation and as individuals to be prepared for this future.

Of course, we cannot share any outcome of this project nor our clients name, but what we can and want to show to you are a few of the 11 different stations we created to get people thinking about the future:

Waste not, want not

What participants saw: Lots and lots of trash.Purpose: Innovation creates value. Innovation also creates waste. Everything that humans ever produce eventually becomes trash. What, then, are we to do as consumers? As designers? Europeans generate 71 billion kilos of packaging waste each year. Who participants talked to: Packaging Designer Richard Williams.

The Future Forecast

What participants saw: Nine talking heads on nine different monitors. Purpose: The world’s leading thinkers have a lot to say about the future. How do you know who’s right? In this room, you will hear aligned and contradictory voices speaking from digital podiums. Who participants talked to: No one, but they listened to nine different futurologists and their predictions about the future. It was unnerving.

The New Producers

What participants saw: Two inventions by young students Purpose: To show that young people are not waiting for grownups to create solutions for them – they create their own solutions. Who participants talked to: Two design students from Germany who had created the prototype a product generator that comes up with a product based on different indicators from your body, and a team of highschool students who had created a solar kiosk.

Minus 10, Plus 10

What participants saw: In form of a tunnel, familiar objects that didn’t exist 10 years ago and fictious headlines we might see during the next ten years. Purpose: To show people how quickly the future approaches.

Perception is Everything

What participants saw:A movie called “perception is everything” Purpose: To show that good things can have a bad effect and vice versa: A movie featuring provocative imagery from our world. Economy, commerce, conflict, and social tensions all clamor to be interpreted and understood. Still, not everything is as it seems. What if bad is good and good is bad?

The Real Deal

What participants saw: Eight real, ordinary people from greater London, ranging in age from 11 to nearly eighty.Purpose: To get participants to talk to real consumers, aged from 11 to 90, who had travelled to Biel as a group that had just met 2 days before. The bonding experience for the group was a big important part of the group meeting with the exhibit participants.

After the immersion exercise, the participants then went through a BrainStore Idea Event to create specific ideas on how to act as a company to be ready for the future. They formulated commitments and rated them, creating a specific action plan for the next years.

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!

I learned about this amazing project while visiting the annual conference PINC in Holland. It is a grassroot movement from Estonia, one of the three Baltic states.

A small group of young people wanted to do something about the incredible amount of illegal waste being dumped in forests everywhere in the country. Mostly they wondered why no one seemed to care. They wanted to solve the problem, but also get people engaged in solving it.

Thus, the project “Let’s do it” was born. Four people decided that they would clean up the mess, in just ONE day, motivating a large portion of the population to participate in a day of cleaning up the forests. Only three full time employees managed to motivate 600 volunteers to participate in the project. They mapped the whole waste with help of GPS and cell phones. Celebrities participated in a campaign – for free! And 50′000 volunteers helped clean up all the mapped territories in just one single day. 10′000 tons of waste were gathered in one single day. Wow. It is truly amazing what people can achieve when they work together for a common cause!

What I like most about this project is that not only did the Estonians get rid of their illegal waste in forests, but they have started an ongoing dialogue about sustainability and ecology that every single Estonian at least heard about, but more likely participated in.

Look at this video about a project for Zappos Showroom done by Stanford design students. What I like about this way of showing an idea is that it actually shows the full interactivity of a future website by using simple, everyday materials and a narrator. The idea is immediately understandable and you can much better understand it than if it were presented with stills or screenshots. And I bet that doing it was fun, too!

This map by reporters without borders shows the countries without free internet activity. It is an impressive image that made me look. The map is part of an advertising campaign for reporters without borders done by the famous “fabrica” ad agency. This map is a great example on how an idea can be visualized in a simple and capturing way.