LEAF™ Innovation Process

We have a very exacting process to get current on your business situation. Quickly and effectively. We meet with your team to present a series of questions and opportunity areas but we also actively listen to your needs, thoughts, ideas and direction. Following the briefing, our team of trend experts provides engaging and emerging global information relevant to the project opportunity. Garnering a steady stream of competitive intelligence on your close-in and fringe competitors keeps us in tune and anticipating potential challenges in the category. We cull through reams of client-supplied research mining that data with a fresh eye and perspective. We design custom research to maximize the information necessary and help identify unmet consumer needs. We are frequently gathering consumer insights using ethnographic techniques—to uncover their unmet and unarticulated needs. Our clients typically join us in this journey of discovery: learning, challenging, and contributing along the way. From this array of inputs, we fuse all of the learnings through experience mapping techniques and share with the team a concise, considerate and robust deliverable. These elements are used as the stimuli for inspiration and our Envision Phase.

Our Envision Workshop is a blend of highly inspirational and strategic exercises with a multi-disciplinary team that includes our client, their agency partners, consumers and outside experts to push and pull concepts, ideas, and innovative approaches into actionable solutions. Held at a dynamic off-site facility, this intensive fast-paced, exhaustive workshop is led by an expert facilitator who will guide the participants through a series of experiential, highly creative and engaging interactive strategic and creative exercises as a broad group, as mini-teams and as individuals. Custom-designed exercises and innovation stations – where different sensory cues, stimuli, tools and products are staged – help to drive fresh new ideas and creative problem solving.

Visual and verbal stimuli are used to push and pull concepts, approaches and inspiration. Key insights garnered by the ethnographic research, as well as meaningful trend data gathered from the previous phase, will provide inspiring springboards for various exercises. Real-time sketching of concepts helps to bring ideas to life.

During this phase, dozens and dozens of ideas and concepts will be generated. Throughout the full- or multi-day session, a formalized process to filter and synthesize the concepts will take place.

The process and its benefits:

• Includes an ethnography research photo/video presentation that defines the needs and challenges of customer/end user.
• Features high-energy interactive ideation sessions, combining white space exploratory with focused creativity.
• Uses customized visual and verbal exercises with stimulus to drive new thinking and garner fresh perspectives.
• Generates a wide range of concepts and directions—pushing to the outside limits of exploration, while always remaining conscious of project success criteria and market relevance.
• Generates a broad range of business building opportunities.
• Identifies the most resonant and appropriate directions or ideas to further flesh out.
• Develops visual and verbal depth around the most compelling opportunities to help dimensionalize and connect with each concept.

In many instances, we will prototype concepts following the first day of the Envision workshop and present the concepts to consumers in a controlled setting to garner feedback and optimize the approaches and provide real-time feedback. We call this technique CoLab™ where our team can make real-time changes to concepts as we hear ideas, thoughts and directions directly from consumers or end-users.

While the Envision phase creates a wealth of rich creative thinking and solutions, the Activate Phase allows us to refine and optimize our collective ideas to develop the most compelling way of communicating the future opportunities. Our goal here is to maximize the visual/verbal potential of the most compelling and viable approaches generated. Each concept is visually and verbally optimized – a tight and clear expression of the compelling opportunity will help determine the most viable directions. For many clients, we are bread boarding product concepts or developing working models to bring into research. In some instances, we’re fast-prototyping a concept to help develop the proof-of-concept. For others we’re delivering a visual and verbal interpretation of the concept, platform or idea. These are multi-sensory deliverables with rich consumer narrative, sound, and visual language where each approach has a rationale and data to support the opportunity. Dimensionalizing through visual language, consumer narrative, 3D models, etc., creates a rich and textured conceptualization for consumer consideration and validation.

In our Activate Phase, we also validate each of the concepts with end-users. Our team can utilize any number of research techniques but our preferred methodology is a hybrid of Qualitative and Quantitative Research. Quantitative research provides the numeric justification for moving forward with a concept into commercialization. While the qualitative research aspect provides the insights behind the answers. Understanding why a consumer or end-user does or does not like a concept can help minimize challenges in commercialization.

With concepts articulated and validated, now is the time to transition these opportunities to the internal staff, external partners and resources to ensure fluid and flawless execution. Our Forward Phase was designed to help our clients successfully integrate the new ideas successfully throughout all touchpoints in the product supply chain. Many different constituencies need to engage and embrace a new product concept. How one communicates the new product idea internally such as to the executive suite is very different than how this idea is articulated to operations, R&D, sales, and customer service. Further, how one shares the new product concept externally to marketing partners, distributors, vendors, reps and retailers has its own set of challenges and communication aspects. In each case, a different set of customized communications needs to take place. As part of our Forward Phase, we engage each of these audiences and bring them into the process – well before this phase – and communicate to them in a voice, tone and language that they understand and relate to gaining buy-in, empowerment and ultimately new product success.