Innovation Imperative

An organization’s ability to survive is defined by its capacity to innovate. Companies must continuously adapt to changing markets, changing technologies, and changing consumer habits and preferences. That’s where we can help. Innovation is what we do.

More Than New Products

Innovation is more than just coming up with ideas for new products. We help companies apply the creativity process to improve their marketing, including:

• New service concepts
• New branding strategies
• New customer experiences
• New brand names
• New positioning concepts
• New promotion ideas
• New packaging ideas
• New display and point-of-sale ideas
• Consumer-Led Innovation

Idea-centric creativity can be identified among nonconsumer groups as well. To date, nearly 75,000 business and trade professionals have been evaluated for idea-centric creativity.

Ideation Sessions

The typical focus group setting—ten chairs arranged around a long table—is excellent for gathering respondents’ opinions and reactions, but it is not the right environment for innovation. Innovation flourishes in an environment that stimulates the brain’s right side.

That’s why our ideation sessions involve creativity exercises, games, associations, unstructured environments (no tables or chairs), spider mapping, guided visualization, and a variety of proprietary techniques developed by Optimize Data Analytics, including “Zoom Out” and “A Picture Is Worth …Lots.”

Innovation Isn’t Instantaneous

Often the most creative ideas take a while to surface, or they develop as a result of several smaller ideas coming together. The more time participants have to think about a problem and build on the ideas put forward by others, the more likely it is that the end results will be truly unique and innovative. Innovation sessions are conducted over relatively long periods of time. In-person sessions last six to eight hours, while an online session can extend over a period of ten business days.

Idea Generation Structure

Optimize Data Analytics’ approach to innovation is a bit different; we use a systemized, creative, problem-solving model based on Socratic inquiry. Our sessions follow a proprietary creativity guide that is objective- and exercise-oriented rather than discussion-oriented. This guide provides the subtle structure that is critical to generating highly unique ideas and suggestions.

Next, Optimize Data Analytics sorts through, combines, and builds on the raw ideas generated in the sessions, and develops a set of first-stage concepts—working names, written descriptions of features and benefits, and supporting illustrations (as needed). Then we hold a first-stage concept review meeting with our client and jointly identify which concepts warrant further development. The selected concepts are reviewed by a small sample from Optimize Data Analytics’ consumer panel to identify how each one can be improved. Then each concept is polished and honed until it is a true and accurate rendition of the product idea.

Employee-Driven Innovation

Optimize Data Analytics uses its Applied Creativity Process to help companies tap into the creativity and expertise of their employees to generate innovative ideas and solutions. This process:

• Helps participants clearly define the objectives and goals.
• Generates a large number of possibilities, ideas, or potential solutions (many more ideas than traditional brainstorming techniques).
• Produces many actionable solutions and possibilities.
• Provides sound, logical rationale when presenting solutions to key stakeholders.
• Promotes implementation and encourages acceptance of the ultimate solutions within the organization.

These creativity sessions can be conducted online or on-site at the company. The deliverables are ready-to-test concepts.

Innovation Services

Optimize Data Analytics has been involved in new product concept development and service development for over 3 decades. We have helped to develop electronic educational toys, electronic games, cellular phones, customer loyalty programs, retail environments, and numerous new food, beverage, and household products. With our targeted innovation processes we can bring transformational change to your new product development efforts.

Innovation services is the culmination of our new products learning to provide innovation for competitive advantage. We have evolved traditional qualitative research into nontraditional, breakthrough ideation services, based on a worldwide Internet platform. We are a global leader in ideation services.