FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

Jamie Neely
1st December 2010

Brilliant Ideas for Business

We are at a time when competing to be a cost leader is a losing game. Winning through number of features or technical brevity is also an increasingly risky route to take. The world is getting smaller and the concept of geography is become irrelevant in many markets.

So amongst all this doom and gloom, where will our competitive advantage come from in the future?

It’s quite simple really – Organisations that embrace innovation through brilliant ideas will be tomorrow’s winners. Those who have known this for a while are already today’s winners. In fact this isn’t a new concept at all – perhaps just a closely guarded secret.

There is a trend at the moment for business journals to talk about ‘design thinking’ and ‘problem solving’, but there is good reason to pay attention.

The recent success of companies like Apple, Netflix, and Goodguide.com, is inspiring a new breed of business leaders to adopt many principles and techniques that were once found only in the studios of design agencies and advertising think tanks.

When you combine the ability to generate brilliant ideas and a genuine empathy for your users, great things can happen. This is where the whole field of User Experience came from.

Damn! I Wish I’d Thought of That/Some Ideas We Like

http://www.graze.com

“graze was started by 7 friends who all share a passion for food. When we found we couldn’t eat the food we loved at work, we asked around and realised there were loads of people just like us.”

The graze service is built around people who want to be healthy at work.

Graze have removed many decisions such as delivery concerns (all graze food is posted 1st class through your letterbox) or cost (all graze boxes cost exactly the same). These clever ideas and more mean that it is a light experience, leaving the user to concentrate on a lingering feeling of health and well-being.

Compare this to the Tescos.com online shopping experience where you sometimes feel you are working around how the service is built.

http://www.adioso.com

“...our ambitions were fairly humble. We simply thought there should be an easier way for Australian travellers to find the cheapest flights on low-cost airlines. As a bit of a novelty, we thought it might be cool to allow open-ended searches via a natural-language interface”

Human-friendly search and a ban on intrusive advertising are just 2 great ideas that lead to a simple and trustworthy Adioso experience. These guys could only have innovated in this way by considering their ideas in the context of what users really want - and working backwards from there.

Ideation is practical

Most of us get things done through project-based working. Working with other people makes sense for lots of reasons, and good ideas should help these teams get things done. They help form future visions that co-workers can cling onto, work towards, and be proud of.

If ideas drive projects then better ideas drive better projects.

Projects often fail because teams can sometimes jump to the wrong conclusions, or go straight to the obvious by asking what should this be?
Being open-minded and having the ideation methods to generate, organise and expand on ideas can lead to a better question: What could this be?

Witchcraft

Contrary to popular belief, brilliant ideas aren’t always the work of one creative wizard and they don’t require some sort of black magic. There are a few very simple things any team can do to have a successful brainstorming session, and produce great ideas.

Jamie Neely – Creative Director

Jamie leads the studios creative output and specialises in user experience strategy / design, information architecture, storyboarding and the development of creative concepts.

You should follow him on twitter here