Most companies are unable to innovate radically
We have the — Weekly — solution
The problem most companies are facing nowadays is quite straightforward: how to stay relevant to their customers. This seems to be the number one question that you as an entrepreneur should really worry about. And if you don’t, some innovative startups in your industry will. Fortunately, most companies have plenty of ideas up their sleeves. The challenge however is to pick the best ones.
The power of innovation got considerable attention in recent years, but for many it remains a misunderstood process. There’s still a sense that innovation is a mysterious mix of luck, the presence of an individual genius and a brilliant idea. And sure, creative ingenuity and intuition as well as accidental discoveries, are part of the innovation formula.
However, we get much better grip on the discovery process if we can take a deeper look into the minds of the innovators. What if we could open that mysterious black box and take a look behind the scenes of how it works? What if we can figure out how radical innovators, people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Bill Gates, came to their ideas? And more importantly, what if we can repeat this process?
For a company to remain relevant for its customers, innovation is not just an option… it’s the only option. Preferably as much and often as possible. So why not every week? Using the experience and insights we — Tim Gouw and Maarten van den Heuvel — have from the corporates we’ve worked for, we designed a modular innovation week. We help companies innovate by translating trends and ideas into a viable product concept, within one week. One week of pretotyping, crammed with trends, ideas and resulting in a dernier cri product or service concept.
Every business day of the week has an important role to build up to the final product. Let’s briefly go through the week day by day.
On Monday, it’s Intake & Insights day. We make a great start by gathering the team and discussing the challenge at hand together. The more information, documents and knowledge your team shares with us on forehand, the faster we go in collecting our insights. By the end of the first day, the challenge and your company values are crystal clear.
Tuesday is a field trip day where we search for important Trends and developments in your industry. What are the best practices and what are your customers’ needs and wishes? Of course, we also take your competitors in mind, to make sure you’ll always be one step ahead.
For the Brainstorm & Ideation day on Wednesday, it is time to bring the team back together. With the assembled insights and trends, we can extract the best ideas from the company. This is probably going to be a great amount of awesome ideas! Thus, prioritizing and combining the best ideas is next on our list.
On Thursday we translate the most promising idea from the brainstorm into a 360 concept. This is a very exciting phase, as the concept truly comes to life by productizing the concept.
With the concept in hand, we use Friday morning to finish up and prepare a product page. Then, the team gets back together for our final presentation: the Weekly Pitch.
The week consists of scheduled meetings and workshops to guarantee the quality of the output. As shown in the calendar below, the orange moments are together with the internal company team. The blue time slots are the times that we head out by ourselves to elaborate on your input.
If we look at each individual case of success in business innovation, there appears to be a pattern emerging. What we see is that most innovations do not only come from inherent, brilliant individuals, but by working in a structured and delineated way. That’s why we started Weekly, The Innovation Startup. No need to wait, book your first week today.
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