WE ARE INNOVATION FACILITATORS

Inspiration

Insightful Interviews

Enrich your face-to-face interviews with questions that help discover people’s hoped for outcomes.

Risk Frameworks

Uncover risk and discover opportunities from analysing your data.

Opportunity Matrix

Heatmap opportunities in your organisation and address them in priority order.

Changing Rooms

Gain new perspectives on your problem by changing the context in which it is occurring.

Preliminary Plan

Create an initial outline of how you will approach your design challenge, identifying people, time and resources  you need.  Prepare for innovation success.

Team Formation

Adversity births innovation.  Diversity inspires innovation.  Form a diverse team of thinkers, makers and doers to take on your design challenges.

Personas

A persona is a rich description of one fictional person
exemplifiying a specific group of people. They help us
achieve empathy, create better ideas and challenge them.

Stakeholder Maps

Map out the multitudes of people who will experience directly or indirectly the impact of solutions to your design challenge.

Group Interview

Interview people in groups as they occur within the context of your design challenge to visualise community interactions and insights.

Lit Review

Consult subject matter experts, mine data, review research and complement your direct observations with those from others outside your design team and challenge community.

Who’s In The Know

Talk to the right people at the right time.  Connect with those in the know using these recruiting tools.

One of Us

Experience challenges first hand alongside those you are designing for.  Walk in their shoes to develop deep understanding and build bridges of trust needed during implementation.

Card Sort

Quickly filter and prioritise design insights to focus on what matters most to those you are designing for.

Montage

Discover what people value and how they process concepts by having them narrate making a montage from fragements of photos and other media.

Expert Interview

Vicarious learning from subject matter experts can add depth and breadth of relevant innovation insights and information.

Innovation Icebreakers

Innovation ice breakers get the flow of ideas and emotion going, freeing people to share their experiences and insights.

Outliers and Ordinary

Solutions that work for everyone require innovation input from everyone, ranging from the ordinary every day users to outliers with extreme use cases.

Habits and Habitat

We learn more living with people than hearing their stories at work.  Go with people to their environment and let them show you first hand their habits and habitat.

Peer Reviews

How do people see themselves? View peer perspectives through reading their short stories about each other’s lives.

Quick Draw

See what people are really saying by drawing what they say, out what they have yet to say, parallels, and conclusions from it all.

Design Challenge Definition

A problem well defined is half solved.  Define your design challenges well using this framework.

Fund Flows

Visualise the flow of funds in, through and out of family, group or individual management to identify opportunities for improved stewardship.

Body Language

Empathise and engage more deeply with those you interview using key body language, facial expressions, eye contact, timing and tone of voice.

Visual Journals

Learn from another’s perspective by reviewing photos and video they have taken in a visual journal.

The Five Whys

Get to the heart of the matter by using this method to move through layers of behaviour to uncover root causes, motivations and assumptions.

Ideation

Brainstorm

No idea out of bounds in this exercise.  Invogorate the innovation process by free flow of thought bouncing off each other to imagine new possibilities. 

The End in Mind

Framing questions as achieved results to help turn insights into outcomes looking for pathways.

Feeback Loop

Use client feedback to guide agile innovation iterations. Ensure you are not designing in an echo chamber.

Pattern Recognition

To discover and interpret hidden patterns and themes in your findings, apply these filters and lenses.

Share and Socialise

Here’s how to share and socialise all that you and your team have learned, then leverage it during innovation ideation.

Glory Storys

Share your most inspiring stories to motivate your team as you make meaning from all you have learned.  A chance to reflect and revitalise enthusiasm for solving your design challenge.

Filters and Frameworks

Distill simplicity from complexity.  Turn your discoveries into reusable models and methods for making sense of data and directing innovation strategy.

On One Hand

Selecting an item for each finger provides a great rule of thumb to focus decision making and action taking.  Use two hands for A/B comparisons.

Rapid Prototyping

Get real results and reality insights by rapidly building and sharing prototypes using paper and pencil, online wireframes, 3D printing and other fast fabrication tools.

Principles

What guidelines unify your design decisions? Use this method to establish decision rationale aligned to hoped for outcomes and expected implications.

Brainstorming Playbook

Practices that promote creativity and unlock emotional engagement during group brainstorming sessions.

Mashups

Spark synergy from composites of brands, products and services to conceive new innovation possibilities.  What would you get if you crossed Uber with a vege shop?  Faster food that’s good to go?

Concept Combos

Combine your best ideas into better solutions.

Concept Creation

Focus your insights and ideas to create a clear concept that addresses the problem you are trying to solve.  You will refine this concept to produce a robust solution.

Follow Your Nose

Feelings and intuition lead us towards ideas that make sense.  Don’t discard seeming distractions without first allowing a little exploration.

Co-Creation

Take time to involve those you interview in creating concepts and prototypes.  Treat everyone as a genius yet to be discovered. Pictures are worth 1000 words. Prototypes magnitudes more.

Prototype Priorities

Focus on priorities when prototyping.  What will yield the best test results?

Storyboards

Use storyboards to show and tell others your concepts from end to end, or just key fragments along the way. Master this quick method to roughly render products, services and experiences.

Role Play

Use theatre skills to take on the character of your personas and test ideas and experiences from their perspectives.

Business Model Canvas

You can use this business on one page template to describe, design, challenge, and pivot your model for any service, business or nonprofit.

Critical Constraints

Filter and distill large quantities of ideas using critical constraints to identify what to pursue and what to put aside for now.

Hands On

Kraft your ideas into prototypes you can see, touch, hear, smell and taste. Engage all your senses to innovate holistically for hands on solution design.

Early Exhibitions

Overcome enterpreneur fear of exposure and exhibit what you have made early and often to elicit constructive criticism from clients and design challenge community members. Make friends with it never being finished.

Distill Design Drivers

Distill a handful of key design drivers to capture the essense of insights and ideas that define the problem and may guide solution innovation. 

Journey Maps

Visualise key moments within product, service and experience sequences to target innovation strategy.

Implementation

Roadmap

Map out milestones to group innovation activity into achievable chunks suitable for agile implementation.

Pilot

Use an initial small scale implementation to work out issues and roadblocks ahead of mass market production.

Cashflow Continuity

A business without cashflow is a hobby or liability.  Form a feasible funding strategy and customer model early.

Do More Together

Grow partnerships with those who can help you get your concept to market.  Use these methods to create win+win relationships and referrals.

In the Wild

Take your prototype out into the wild for a brief run.  Learn from experience what you can’t from lab experiments.

Continuous Innovation

Keep cycling through thinking, making and testing.  Be quick to respond to reality and customer feedback.

Pitch Perfect

Use this outline to perfect your pitch and craft a message that motivates your personas including customers, investors and partners.

Growth Grid

Categorise growth approaches to attract the maximum mix of early adopters and faithful followers.  Get the right balance of incremental change and revolution.

Roles and Skills Matrix

Maximise your chance of innovation success using this matrix to ensure you have the right people doing the right things at the right time.

Meaningful Measurement

Design meaningful metrics and bake their measurement into your design. Make it easy to capture data and outsource if appropriate.

Funding Strategy

Implement a feasible funding strategy to ensure cashflow crises don’t crash your solution launch or longterm success.

Define Success

Visualise success and map our milestones that matter.  Consider persona perspectives. Walk, then crawl, then run, rather than stumble blindly.

Hire Your Heros

Build your dream team to build your dream.  Hire and inspire those who can help take you from prototypes to production.

Resonance

As your solution ever converges to meet client needs as a production success, continue to gather feedback to maximise resonance and customer delight.

Pivot or Persevere

Pivot is a change of strategy without change of the vision. Here is a framework to help you decide when to pivot or persevere.