Who knew that a casual lunch with an old friend could lead to some of the most rewarding work of my career and an exciting new consulting gig for the Business Design team at Machteld Faas Xander (MFX)?

This is a story about a big, somewhat traditional organization who were struggling to make innovation a part of every employee’s job. Another well meaning, but ineffective idea generation contest was definitely not the answer. Luckily for us, we quickly discovered that the company had the right leadership team and work climate in place to make the necessary shifts required. To come to this realization, we used our Creative Climate Assessment, which employees filled out online in just a few minutes. Clients like how fast the survey takes to complete, and how fast they can get the results and identify quick changes to energize their team. The assessment identified the aspects of the organization that are supporting creativity and innovation today, those that are hindering it and the top priorities to better enable creativity and innovation.

We’ve also been working with a cross-disciplinary project team made up of 14 adventurous employees from the company. The intent of the work is to develop innovative products or solutions to address unmet customer needs. This project kicked off with a full-day Design Thinking workshop led by MFX. Unlike most training programs with content that is quickly forgotten we ensure the principles and practices we share become part of life within organizations by working on a real business challenge over a period of 6-12 months.

As part of this project, research was required to identify unmet customer needs. MFX traveled across Canada to conduct research with the company’s top customers. We utilized a unique mapping process, which revealed 35 opportunities to improve the lives and businesses of our client’s customers.

The next step of this project will involve prioritizing the list of opportunities, brainstorming, prototyping and testing possible solutions.

The key success factors of our work with this organization included:

1. Understand the working climate to build on the good stuff and minimize the barriers.
2. Establish a project team who learn and apply key principles and techniques on a real business challenge.
3. Utilize advanced design research techniques to unpack what customers are trying to achieve to identify ways to help them do them better, faster, cheaper etc.