"Insight and ideation are two key phases in the innovation process. Insight is a time of understanding that allows us to clarify issues and areas of opportunity. Ideation is a time of creativity whose objective is to provide a relevant response adapted to the right target.
For the phase ofinsight, we must start from a strategic issue for the company or the brand. From this issue we explore different sources of consumer knowledge in order to understand and then write the insights. To promote a complete understanding, our bias is to favor, when time allows, the synthesis of several consumer sources combining behavioral data, ethnographic observations, social listening, qualitative or quantitative studies. For what? Because each knowledge channel has its advantages and limitations. And it is by crossing several clues that the surest insights can be identified and linked to specific targets.
To express the insights our other bias is editorial: in fact, it will have to navigate within your organization, be self-supporting to be understood by everyone - without ambiguity, without risk of multi-interpretation. And to do this, we use our SMT© method which we also detail in our training.
The insights from the 1st stage of insight provide the material for theidea, which constitutes the second stage of the innovation process. It’s about developing value propositions that will really make sense for your targets. To do this, there are two key factors for success: the casting of the workshop and the animation approach. Concerning the mobilized casting on the one hand, we recommend the plurality of professions involved as well as the involvement of consumer witnesses because it is this method which leads to the most effective proposals. Depending on the challenges, it is possible to involve drafters and designers to go as far as prototyping.
Regarding animation techniques on the other hand, we use our SMT© methodological framework, which allows us to deliver optimal clarity and avoid the trap of multi-interpretation. During ideation labs, we favor permanent iterations with control targets who of course do not participate in the creative debates - to which we submit drafts of value propositions in order to adjust them by finding the clearest and most efficient angle. Then we submit them again, all in a total two-day format, allowing you to then have secure, consumer-centric value propositions ready to be quantitatively evaluated.
Of course, we observe from experience that in many cases these phases of insight and ideation tend to intermingle. That the back and forth between understanding and the creative idea ends up blurring the boundary between the consumer vision and the creative vision of the brand. So sometimes, the vision we have of consumer needs can be distorted by the prism of the creative idea that we helped to bring about. The methodological framework and iterative sequences that we have developed help to avoid this type of trap to ultimately ensure the drafting of relevant value propositions that address real areas of opportunity."