We don't send a deck of insights and leave you with questions. We care about ensuring the insights we uncover are ultimately owned by the business, and conduct our work in a transparent and informative manner throughout, ensuring genuine handovers and delivering tangible evidence of the work, be it snippets of research with users, working and useful code or a physical product that does the job even if not at scale. During the engagement, we work alongside you and your people, sharing knowledge at every step, until you have a working product and real evidence. Think "booster rocket" not "ivory tower."

Question: How does a typical engagement look like:
We typically break up the work into clarifying stages. Each stage has clear goals and value, and evidence requirements before moving forward. We keep you informed of what we are working on and want to work in close collaboration with your stakeholders and subject matter experts, as well as with the people who will be ultimately impacted by the outcomes of the work. You'll always see progress weekly, not after months of mystery work.

Question: What if the idea turns out to be "wrong"?
We believe in learning that as quickly and early as possible through clever tests, prototypes, MVP, proof of concept or anything that supports learning. Most "failures" redirect to better opportunities, in our experience, and we'll ensure you also see the silver lining.

Question: Do you work with tech teams?
A: Yes, absolutely, we have a roster of preferred technology partners depending on the stack required, and collaborate with your current development teams. We help bridge the gap between your business knowledge and external technical expertise wherever possible.

If you are our typical customer, you're very good at what you do and have been doing it for years, so naturally your team is composed of people who can pilot and maintain products or services at a consistent very high level of performance, and likely have never done or forgotten the early "clearing of the jungle" part of innovation and getting off the ground.

We help you find the people in your teams who are right for innovation work and bring them along, and we'll involve the other subject matter experts as they are critical holders of corporate and market knowledge. Not everyone needs to brainstorm - some people are brilliant at keeping reality in check. Everyone needs to feel they contributed though, that's a key ingredient of adoption and diligence.

We strongly recommend to invest in stages, in order to re-risk and optimise learning. Typical stages are based on best practive product lifecycles and imply a gate of careful vetting and review between stages, with progressive investment being released.

0. Ideating

• We help you unearth and collect innovation ideas from your teams and customers through engaging workshops, data-enriching activities or customer interviews that unearth authentic unmet needs. We then help format them into a comparable manner in order to be able to select where to invest.

• Typically 2-6 weeks

• This engagement is about providing you with ideas sufficiently formulated so you can easily decide which ones you want to invest on, and explore in the next stages.

• We recommend an internal review of findings that will check for a match between insights and overall business strategy, preferably with a conservative outlook, and release funding only for further discovery and not full-on build at scale. 

1. Discovering

   • To fully understand the context, constraints and possibilities of your people, processes, tools and partners with an eye for opportunity and a realistic sense of capability. 

   • Typically 3-5 weeks.

   • Our engagement always ends with enough insights and understanding so you are sufficiently informed to decide whether you "stop / change ideas / invest to further explore" as ultimately your updated strategy needs to guide innovation initiatives. You will also be provided with information for planning the next stage if you decide to prototype

   • Once this stage is completed, we recommend an internal review of findings for extensiveness and quality, a review of the work done and the appetite amongst teams, and a refreshed check against business strategy, before any decision to release funding only for further prototyping and scoping.

2. Prototyping, testing and scoping: 

   • Whether it's a prototype or a proof of concept, we want to build just enough to learn hands-on what's feasible, how it could work, how it would be received and how much it'd cost to make it happen at scale if feasible. 

   • Typically 6-12 weeks, comprising planning, building and testing in real-world conditions or as-near-as, and scoping for building at scale.

   • We conclude our engagement providing you with real-world evidence of what the full work would entail and cost, so you can decide if you want to continue and bring your innovation to market, stop, or explore another idea.

   • Once this stage is completed, we recommend you conduct an internal review that will focus on reviewing the insights gathered and in case of positive signals, review their fit against strategic goals as well as competency and availability within the business for further work. The decision to be taken here is to go/no go into building that new product and service, beyond the technical feasibility and market appetite: does your organisation have enough bandwidth, resources and support to expand at scale?

3. Initiating the build at scale: 

   • We accompany you in selecting vendors or briefing your teams, and ensuring that all the knowledge and strategy garnered in previous phases are transferred and the focus is maintained. This is typically a point in projects where consultants have left and vendors have come in and redo their own discovery or even prototype. We save you that time and cost by ensuring continuity, and help you stay very focused on what  your first version in market needs to be, as we often see clients start adding unvalidated features and functionalities in their excitement at being close to success, adding new costs, time and complexity and jeopardising all the early work. 

   • Typically 3-9 months, depending on the scope of the build and set-up of the teams.

   • We work in a transitioning manner, progressively exiting ourselves as knowledge and competencies are acquired by your teams, and leave you on track for success with confidence and know-how.