BMC Design - Ideation

BMC Design - Ideation

Elmar Mock is listening carefully

as Peter elaborates excitedly on an idea

amid a sea of Post-it™ notes smothering

the walls . .

. . Peter works for a pharmaceutical group that has hired Elmar’s innovation consultancy, Creaholic, to help with a breakthrough product. 

The two men are part of a six-person innovation team holding a three-day offsite meeting.  

The group is deliberately heterogeneous, a pastiche of different experience levels and backgrounds.

Elmar Mock boasts a long track record of breakthrough innovation.

He is one of two inventors of the legendary Swatch watch.

Since then, he and his team at Creaholic have helped companies such as BMW, Nestlé, Mikron, and Givaudan innovate successfully.

Elmar knows how difficult it is for established companies to innovate. Such firms require predictability, job descriptions, and financial projections.

Though all members are accomplished specialists, they joined the group not as technicians, but as consumers unsatisfied with the current state of affairs. 

Creaholic instructed them to leave their expertise at the door and carry it with them only as a “backpack” of distant memories. 

For three days the six form a consumer microcosm and unleash their imaginations to dream up potential breakthrough solutions to a problem, unbridled by technical or financial constraints. 

Ideas collide and new thinking emerges, and only after generating a multitude of potential solutions are they asked to recall their expertise and pin down the three most promising candidates.

Yet real innovations emerge from something better described as systematic chaos. Creaholic has found a way to master that chaos. Elmar and his team are obsessed by innovation.

Open Ended

From the story what should you do, to come out with great innovation?