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In Tough Times, ‘Hyper-Creatives’ Provide Creative Advantage

by Jerry W. Thomas

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Hyper-creatives and Ideation

What is the best way to use these creative individuals to generate new product ideas? First, creativity does not take place in a vacuum. New product creation demands starting points and focal points. Creativity must have rails to run on, a purpose, and a destination. Client involvement is critical to the success of a new products project because clients are the experts on their companies’ goals, technical capabilities, risk tolerances, marketing strengths, and budget capacities. Clients’ knowledge and understanding, as well as their feedback along the way, create the guidelines and context that help ensure the successful outcome of a new product ideation project.

Once the new product development goals are fully understood, these goals are translated into starting points for the ideation process. Ideation sessions can be in-person (all-day group sessions with eight to 10 hyper-creatives and facilitators) or online with a larger number of hyper-creatives.

In-Person Ideation

In-person sessions are usually led by two innovation facilitators, who take the hyper-creative participants through a carefully selected series of fast-moving, high energy creative exercises focused on the project’s goals. A typical session lasts from 9 a.m. in the morning until 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. in the afternoon. Client observation of these sessions is extremely valuable. During the lunch break, clients meet with the facilitators to discuss the morning session and select new product ideas (or new starting points) to build upon in the afternoon session. The group interaction and creative exercises are stimulants to hundreds of new ideas or idea fragments, and the client’s involvement helps guide and augment the creative process.

Online Ideation

Online sessions involve a larger number of hyper-creatives, usually 20 or more, and take place over a period of seven to 10 days. One advantage of the online session is the power of more minds over the eight or 10 in an in-person session. A second advantage of online ideation is the power of time. As these imaginative consumers think about a product category over a period of days, more and more ideas come to mind. Like in-person sessions, online sessions are fueled by a series of creativity exercises organized around the objectives of the project, and client involvement in the process is essential to success. The outcome is hundreds and hundreds of relevant new product ideas and idea fragments.

New Product Concepts

But the real work has just started. The hundreds of raw product ideas and idea fragments must be sorted through, analyzed, melded with other ideas, and checked against the client’s development objectives and constraints. Typically, an innovation team mines the raw ideas and idea fragments, identifies the better ideas, and then shapes them into more fully developed, integrated “first-stage’’ concepts. A first-stage concept consists of a rough copy and perhaps a rough illustration. At this point, perhaps 20 to 30 first-stage concepts might be created.

Now it’s time for the “first-stage concept review’’ with the client. Based on client feedback, 10 to 15 of the better first-stage concepts are identified for final development. These concepts then go through an online qualitative “communication check’’ to ensure they are fully understood by target consumers. Based on consumer feedback, the concepts are edited and the artwork is refined. Now the final, test-ready concepts are presented to the client for final review.

At this point, the client has new product concepts that communicate as intended, and the next steps are concept screening and concept testing. If the number of concepts is large, the screening step is always recommended to identify the stronger concepts. Then the best new product concepts go through a final monadic concept test, to quantify the market potential represented by the new product idea. Concepts with high potential then become the focus of R&D efforts to deliver a product that lives up to the concept’s promise.

Opportunity Knocks

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Jerry W. Thomas is president and chief executive of Decision Analyst Inc. (www.decisionanalyst.com), a leading international marketing research and marketing consulting firm. The company specializes in advertising testing, strategy research, new product ideation, new product research, and advanced modeling for marketing-decision optimization. The author may be reached at jthomas@decisionanalyst.com or by calling 800.262.5974 or 1.817.640.6166.

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