/Strategic Innovation

Innovation is critical to fueling growth and creating meaningful differentiation in business. But not every company has figured out how to implement and activate a process that aligns with its culture and category.

/ Innovation Process & Training
/ Workshops
/ Organizational Transformation
/ Business Model Innovation

Having built and implemented a process that works across companies and categories, our Strategic Innovation practice is where we share our knowledge, principles, practices and tools with organizations that need to boost their innovation skill sets. A structured program that brings together best-in-class methodologies and tools to create new competencies, it helps companies solve challenges, drive customer value and maximize market influence.

By designing for a strategic action, industry context, organizational culture and the need to better connect with consumers, we make innovation purposeful and tangible.

Scott Friedmann on "Innovation has to be Global"

/Innovation Process & Training

Patrick Glinski on "Practicing Innovation Strategy"

Innovation is on the executive radar, but few organizations know how to optimize a process that is relatively new in large companies. While most innovations have historically come out of product development, a much broader design-centric, multidisciplinary approach offers the power to develop new ideas sooner and see blind spots faster.

Our experience studying innovation activities in large companies around the world drives how we help our clients design and implement innovation tools, processes and systems, including: flow and activity ownership, staffing and skills, enabling infrastructure and resources, team interaction, insight generation, co-creation, strategic foresight, sense-making, opportunity mapping, prototyping, prioritization, and branding and marketing.

At Idea Couture, we work with client teams to determine the relevancy, value and usage of specific methods to design a comprehensive and customized tool-kit that drives success.

/Workshops

How many managers have challenged their teams to 'think outside the box' only to be disappointed that their output of inspirations or ideas feel decidedly inside the same old, same old box?

At Idea Couture, we understand that the box is bigger than the office cubicle; it’s an entire ecosystem of assumptions, practices, principles and processes. Our workshops are designed to get teams out of that ecosystem and into a new frame of mind where everyone can reset, rethink and re-imagine business challenges.

Half day, full day or more, our team of anthropologists, sociologists, futurists, strategists, designers, technologists and others are available to put new lenses on old problems, to introduce Design Thinking methodologies and to inspire our clients to see things differently.

/Organizational Transformation

Leah Hunter on "Driving Ideas Forward"

Conventional visioning and mission writing exercises often fall short of driving successful transformation, because they typically lead to a detached cynicism rather than an engaged motivation. When executives and frontline employees move beyond empty, slogan-driven communications, a shared destiny and clear commitment to organizational purpose are ultimately reflected in improved work processes and customer experiences.

Whether it's brand led or structural, transformation can reenergize a company, inspire employees, anchor a growth strategy and create competitive differentiation. To be truly successful, however, it must be designed with discipline, championed by senior leadership, manifested through holistic experience, relevant to the competitive environment and grounded in the culture of the organization.

Our Organizational Transformation practice is grounded in an ethnographic understanding of company culture and stakeholder co-creation. By helping clients understand and implement the stories, sentiments and social systems that can bring executives and employees together as a community of purpose, we help inspire greater purpose, meaning and collaboration across every level of an organization.

/Business Model Innovation

Idea Couture has a robust framework to help create business scale, scope and positioning in the value-chain. Our business model development considers all players in an ecosystem, including customers, competitors, suppliers, partners and employees. Combining user centricity and purposeful design, we challenge the strategic assumptions of our clients, re-frame the role of the company within the value chain and re-define how to address unmet or unarticulated human needs. This can involve an application of technology or service design that will displace a current market leader, create an entirely new market or even add another bottom line, like social innovation.

Hesam Masoumi talks "How to Succeed in Business Model Innovation"