Services

With Ideas that grow™, we design and offer many services to help you meet your brand and innovation needs.

Market Research

We have years of experience thinking outside the box ("What box?"), and can design unique market research techniques to fit the needs of many projects. Here are a few examples.

Consumer Research

The company designs research that

  • captures new insights into the needs, attitudes, and lifestyles of consumers
  • evaluates new products, line extensions, and concepts
  • determines brand and product benefits, features, and attributes
  • identifies and describes target audiences
  • captures the new behaviors and attitudes of leading edge consumers and change agents

Exploratory Workshops

Creative workshops are facilitated with consumers who are Scouts or other behavior leaders. These 2 to 3 hour sessions use inventive methodologies to uncover new behaviors and beliefs about the client category. These insights are translated into the ideal consumer use experience, which becomes the platform for new product idea generation.

Workshops are interactive and hands-on, using techniques like art immersion, salon, archetypal profiling, mind mapping, journaling, attribute mapping, and others.

Archetypal Profiling

Archetypal profiling describes the blend of human behaviors within target audience groups and its impact on their expectations for product experiences. Classical personalities are used as representatives for human behaviors, lending universal models with very human traits and experiences that reflect contemporary human lives. These personalities model "archetypal" roles - Mother, Father, Sister, Son, Lover, Achiever, etc.- that have profound connections to consumers and to their values and behaviors. Each of the profiles has been developed with the assistance of members of the C.J. Jung Institutes in Zurich and Chicago, psychologists, and medical practitioners.

Scout Excursions

Innovation gatherings mix the client team with Scouts who are familiar and experienced in the innovation process. These informal but inventive and in-depth events provide an overview of new human behaviors and their implications for the client's categories or technologies. These implications yield new platforms for innovation and product development.

Facilitation and Idea Generation

We are naturals at generating ideas, readily connecting consumer insights to new opportunities. But if you have more formal needs, we also facilitate problem-solving sessions that meet idea generation and strategy development objectives. A few customized methodologies are described below.

The World Café

The World Café, published in 1995 by Juanita Brown (with David Isaacs and The World Café Community), is both inspiration and guide for this creative problem-solving process. The World Café is an easy and energetic process for fostering collaborative dialogue, sharing knowledge, and discovering new opportunities. Ideas that grow™ has used The World Café to help clients explore and define new opportunities in products and services, as well as develop strategies for corporate entrepreneurship and team-building. The Café is effective with groups as small as twelve and as big as several hundred.

Art&Soul™

Art&Soul™ combines the talents of artists, writers, performers, and experienced ideators with those of the client to develop concepts and prototypes (the Art) that represent the desired user experience (the Soul) described by the market research. It is unique in that within a day, the consumer experience is transformed into benefit platforms, concepts and prototypes.

Innovation Strategy Development

This work has been facilitated with clients who have definitive core competencies, but wish to push them toward "what might be possible". This approach is taken to generate corporate innovation strategies, including new consumer, product, and technology directions. Creative new strategies are identified that reflect competencies, identify new capabilities, and connect them to marketplace opportunities.

Innovation Fairs

Valuable product ideas that meet consumer needs are often hidden "under the radar" within companies. Innovation Fairs coax them out. We coach clients to conduct an internal, informal "advertising" campaign that invites innovators to participate. Their ideas are transformed into full concepts in a one-day creative session. The commercialized design of HUGGIES® Pull-Ups® training pants gained visibility and support as a result of its presentation in a Kimberly-Clark Innovation Fair.

Product & Concept Development

We love to cut and paste, and are experienced in the entire process of new product development, from market research to product design, development, and positioning.

Support of Consumer Rituals

Ideas that grow emphasizes the richness of rituals in human behavior. Rituals lend consistent, comfortable patterns that support existing behaviors and encourage new ones by connecting consumers to their core values. Products are specifically designed and positioned to be positive triggers for these responses, encouraging rituals that reinforce meaningful consumer experiences and pathways for new product adoption.

Prototype Design

The deep consumer insights uncovered with Ideas that grow direct product design toward a Vision Product that represents the ideal design, performance, and use experience desired by the consumer. Initial product development refines the commercial opportunity, that is, those design elements of the Vision Product that can be more easily introduced short term. The remaining Vision elements plant a stake in the ground that lends strategy and direction to the product's long-term development.

Communications

Concept postionings are developed and evaluated using creative communication techniques (stories, music, video, as well as electronic and traditional concept boards). We partner with well-established creative agencies when art development, commercial graphics and A&P work are required. Paula is also an experienced and creative namer for new companies, products, and services.