Say hello to Weekly, The Innovation Startup

Setting the new standard in customer experience for agencies

Helping companies to innovate is exciting. It’s a surprise where you end up every day, you meet a variety of people and above all your brain has to crunch the most challenging business problems. There’s one recurring problem: how to distinguish from other agencies? Lately, more and more firms offer innovation-like services. Fact is, they aren't very innovative themselves.

That’s why we are starting Weekly, The Innovation Startup.

Management consulting firms want to move into creative thinking and creative agencies want to move into management consulting. It seems that everyone wants to fight their way into the boardroom and consult on innovation, customer experience, social media, and business design. This remarkable shift however is no guarantee for success. They rely on more or less the same methods, theories and models. It’s hard to be distinctive and even the largest consulting firms are in a difficult position. These big companies have failed to innovate within markets that are at a tipping point.

“When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. They treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare.” — CHRIS ANDERSON, Former Wired Editor in Chief

Ten years ago you definitely needed an accountant, lawyer or consultant to perform certain tasks, whereas nowadays knowledge is just a Google search away. Therefore, companies are looking for specialists in being a generalist rather than experts with experience in a specific field or someone who just sells sleek advice. This attitude demands for more transparency in consultancy services as well as in their output. Walking away after delivering inscrutable reports and ditto slide decks is getting harder by the day.

Reason enough to pursue a different angle. After working for over three years in the agency and consultancy business, both as colleagues and competitors, we are ready to try something new. So let’s shake up the innovation industry! Therefore we, Maarten van den Heuvel and Tim Gouw, have asked ourselves one question: how would a creative agency look like from a startup mentality perspective?

Where do you begin if you are able to reinvent the business of helping companies to innovate? Which trends, methods and insights do you use if you can start all over? What happens if you take the best practices from B2C customer experience and incorporate these in a B2B environment? Here’s what happens: an entrepreneurial experiment, for which we both gave our two weeks notice.

“We have come to the conclusion that the same forces that disrupted so many businesses, from steel to publishing, are starting to reshape the world of consulting.” — CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, Harvard Business Review

Let’s talk about our name: Weekly, The Innovation Startup. 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 have from the companies we 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 productizing, crammed with trends, ideas and resulting in a dernier cri product or service.

We've already achieved our first success. In the spring of 2014 we were able to save 9 of the largest bookshops in the Netherlands from closure by crowdfunding 250,000 euros in just two weeks. By founding Weekly we’ll be able to consistently deliver refreshing innovation and simultaneously set the new status quo for customer experience within an agency.
Say hello to Weekly, The Innovation Startup. We'll be in touch!

In the meantime please visit goweekly.co and book your first week of innovation.

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