Forward Thinking – Innovating for the Future

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What does the future of your business look like? Is your product range fit for an ever-changing world or do you need to adapt? Evolving your product range to thrive in ever changing and fast paced competitive markets can be an ongoing challenge.

At OPD we run innovation workshops, sessions that are designed to coach and coax ideas from the people who know your business best; you and your team. Our approach is bespoke to every organisation that we work with, tailored to the specific opportunities and challenges that you are facing. Our sessions are layered, each one building upon the last, until we reach an output that helps you define and give clarity to your future.

Understanding your DNA and what underpins your existing business is core to the entire process. We’ll look at your current brand to clarify your sweet spots and any possible blind spots, and then help explore your business through a series of different lenses. Looking inwards we’ll consider your existing customers, the environment that they operate in and the types of tasks they undertake. Looking outwards we’ll examine influences and trends – both micro and macro, that might impact the future of you and your customers. Moodboards will help set the scene and provide inspiration at this early stage.

Once we’ve understood the landscape then the fun really starts. We draw upon a toolbox of proven ideas generation ideas that will help you explore the depths of your imagination as to what your ideal future business could look like. We’ll guide this by picking the activities that we think would provide the greatest value to you and that we think would suit the dynamic of your team. Everything is up for consideration at this point – the more ideas we have, the more we can really consider the right choices for your future.

Once we’ve captured all insights we create an ‘Ideas Park’ where we display all the ideas that have been captured into one large wall of inspiration. This striking visual prompt gives everyone an opportunity to review all the outputs and reflect on which of the many and varied direction(s) offer the most possibilities. Ideas are then filtered through our ‘Opportunity Mapping Tool’, a bespoke tool that we developed to evaluate these against a range of different axis. An opportunity that might fit your existing market might not actually work within the ecosystem of your current business, for example. This tool helps us define what best fit looks like for your organisation, not just in an ideal world, but within the actual infrastructure that you are operating.

The most promising ideas then become the focus of a deeper level of exploration. Techniques include activities such as developing intended user personaes and customer journeys for the product. We use dimensioning tools to help us visually analyse gaps and define the most powerful opportunities for the future. We’ll make sure you leave these sessions with a full inventory of everything we’ve discussed and a road map of what your future may look like.

We’d love to help you create a new vision for your future. Get in touch today and find out how we can help you evolve your products in an ever changing world.

 

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