Brainstorming • hackathons • inventing sessions • accelerators • strategy
building
innovative ideas
Today’s business world is changing at an unprecedented rate.
Which is why Eureka!’s hallmark of inventing bold strategies, products, services & brands at super-sonic speeds is a game-changer. It allows you to respond to the changing market demands with wow innovations that not only win customers, but they prevent competitors from following.
we help you invent big ideas for new / improved:
Products & Services
High growth companies have a full pipeline of exciting new products & services. And we happen to specialize in creating those very things.
Fun Fact: The average American home has 18 products or services we’ve created.
Process Improvement
Creating new products is one thing. But if your systems are broken, you’re wasting time and energy.
We can help by assessing your current systems, redesigning & improving them.
New Businesses & Brands
Creating a new business or brand can catapult your business into new categories and explosive growth.
We can help by not just envisioning the new business but forecasting it’s worth before it’s real.
Business Strategy
Deciding where & how to grow your business can be difficult when you can’t predict the future.
We can help by not only inspiring new directions, but vetting them before you invest significant time and money.
Platforms
When you have a technology you want to leverage or a space you want to own, it allows for added depth of New Product Development.
We can help by creating a pipeline of products, services or businesses that fit your existing platforms OR creating completely new ones.
Breakthroughs
If you want to get business your competition doesn’t have, you need to not just have a disruptive edge, you have to “own” it so your competition can’t copy you.
We can help by inventing proprietary innovations that you own.
Fun Fact: Many of our sessions include 1 or more provisional patents. Good thing we have patent counsel on-staff.
See a session in action by watching the pro-bono work we did for Waterfields, an urban farm.
Generating New Ideas. Solving Big Problems.
Since 1986 we’ve been inventing big ideas for the world’s most discerning brands and businesses. Along the way we’ve learned and walked the talk of innovation by doing original R&D on innovation methods and continuously improved our approach.
TEAMS WORKED WITH
IDEAS CREATED & TESTED
PRODUCTS IN US HOMES
Cups Of Coffee (GIVE OR TAKE)
Every significant systemic improvement of our methodology coincides with drops in consumer confidence. Said another way, when the world goes through a significant shift – the same methods that worked once before prove less effective. So we adapted and re-invented our approach – leveraging past strengths and innovating new ones.
Where it all started
Our approach began in the 1980s when our founder, Doug Hall, worked at P&G. The organization took note of his extraordinary results when they saw he launched 9 products in 12 months – a record. In fact, it was such an astonishment that the P&G Finance Department was tapped to do an audit. And they found that not only did Hall and his team ship, they did it in 16% of the time, 18% of the cost and 10% of the staffing.
So in 1986, Hall took his approach out on his own – and what is known today as Eureka! Ranch and version 1.0 of Eureka! Inventing was born.
Today, thanks to constant R&D and innovation on smarter methods for innovating, we’re on version 10.0 of the Eureka! Inventing approach – helping companies and teams find, filter and fast track big ideas.
Our APPROACH
FIND
The Find stage of every project is unique. It’s comprised of deep immersion of the challenge – gathering 6 different types of stimulus to help generate ideas.
We then use different formats of collaborative sessions – hackathons, create sessions, remote brainstorming – to create and document meaningfully unique ideas.
FILTER
What happens when you have volumes of ideas, but you don’t know what ones are the right ones to invest in?
We leverage our Merwyn Rapid Research suite to help take the guess work out of innovation decisions. It includes concept screeners that take just hours and forecasting tools to predict just how big the “win” will be from each idea.
FAST TRACK
With the pace of change today, you have to be able to not only invent big ideas fast, but develop and ship them at lightening speed or the opportunity might pass you by.
Our accelereated development process (a hybrid of elements of PDSA to Lean Startup & Product Developement and Agile) is key. In fact, clients report a 6x faster speed to market using our approach.
Each project we do is as unique as the innovations we create. In 30-minutes we can do a quick scoping of your challenge and create an innovative project design together!
PHOTO GALLERY
Whether we’re doing a 6-hour Hackathon with 60 staff or a 6 week Accelerator Sprint to incubate a new platform and product pipeline, the underlying system at work ensures best practices are applied throughout.
Check out the photos below for a tour behind the scenes of some of the sessions across the years.
Remote Accelerated Development
While we can accomplish a lot of problem-solving and inventing face-to-face. In today’s world we also collaborate virtually with experts and assets across the globe before, during and after ideation sessions to accelerate the development of ideas.
No talk, All Do with Data
Here samples are about to be distributed to 30 potential customers to get quantitative feedback within an hour – which means we can run multiple cycles of experimentation in hours and days versus waiting weeks and months.
The Power’s in the Prep
Even though the “sexy” part of our work tends to be the ideation sessions, weeks of intensive research and in-depth exploration are what make the events effective and the ideas disruptive, divergent and doable.
Hackathons
The quiet moments before a hackathon held at a company’s headquarters – that engaged 50 staff in a cross-company hackathon to create ideas for leveraging new technology.
Hackathon Pitch Prep
A team has their idea, now it’s time to put it together into the business plan pitch they’re going to present at the end of the day to leadership.
Agile Session Design
Innovating is part science, part art. We always have a gameplan for sessions – but we have dozens of alternative exercises and activities at the ready should the need arise. This means every session we do maximizes our time together…even when things change in the heat of the moment.
Expertise Abounds
Our resident expert chef, Phillip, works to create taste tests at a record pace. This radically different concept was dreamed into reality at 1pm and 22 servings were ready for consumer tasting by 6pm.
Death to the Red Dot
Teams synthesize ideas without “dot voting” or “over-organizing.” Our process respects the individual and the potential of ideas before it is apparent.
Process (and some Pros)
While we’ve worked over for decades to constantly improve our innovation system, we still use our seasoned pro’s to facilitate and co-create right along with you.
The Morning After
Many of the multi-day sessions include evening focus groups and overnight quantitative testing of ideas. The next morning, like magic, the project team returns to the reactions of customers, new data and new information to inform their choices.
Simultaneous Inventing
Interdisciplinary teams work to reinvent retail – reacting off of business model stimulus and creating entirely new frameworks.
Plan, Do, Study, Act Acceleration
While it looks fun, these teams are doing disciplined PDSA cycles – they aren’t just throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Each experiment starts with a hypothesis, then a test, analysis and reflection.
R and D Mixology
Cross-functional teams work together to make quick prototypes of their inventions.
Volumes of Stimulus
In this beverage session, stimulus from across the world helped the team not only invent new products but also create fast prototypes.
Systems Improvement Sessions
Here a team works to innovate improvements into their project management system.
No-Ego Feedback
Making your idea great means being open to honest feedback. Here we do collaboration rounds to identify potential “Death Threats” that could stop the innovation in its tracks.
Speed Collaboration
Sessions always include massive amounts of diversity – getting people from different functions and different experience levels. Here team-members do the “Gauntlet” exercise to problem-solve and improve ideas.
Quantitative Customer Feedback
Sometimes there is no better way to get feedback from customers than first-person, and with quantitative data to back it up. Here we run a Rapid Test on new Food Service concepts.
Hands-on Invention
Our sessions often involve hands-on creating of prototypes. [Do not be fooled by this pic though. Even though this shows a food-service inventing session, we also do prototyping for industrial, b-to-b and service projects…like spectral arrays sent to space, oil drilling platform technology and next generation commerce.]
The I in Innovation
While collaboration is key in innovation, so is INTRINSIC motivation and the power of the INDIVIDUAL Inventor. Here Kenisha takes time to capture a potential idea as she sees it.
The Discipline of Math in Action
It is uncommon to do forecasting and math projections during an inventing session – but we find it helps us quickly triangulate “size of prize” and helps us think of the inventions as a business, not a widget. Here James uses our proprietary forecasting calculator to quickly estimate 5-year sales for a new business idea.
Basements, Backyards and Banquet Centers
We have crammed innovation sessions into every possible venue you can think of. From fun spots, like Disneys Imagination Pavilion and a Boeing 747 to side rooms at banquet centers – as seen here. The good news…when you have a methodology that works, it works in every setting.
Inventing since 1986
Inventing sessions have been held at our custom-built Eureka! Ranch facility for years. Today about 50% of our work is held at other locations around the world.
Energy then. Energy now.
The energy seen in this session with the YMCA in the late 90s still abounds in the work we do today.
Stimulus!
We collected stimulus from around the globe to help this food manufacturer innovate new products.
Real-time Graphics
Many of our more conceptual, process or service-focused projects involve visual prototypes versus building physical structures. Having a graphic artist on hand helps us create quick renderings that are used to get better feedback when testing ideas.
Real-time Prototyping
Whenever possible, we include real-time prototyping in our projects. It makes the learning curve so much faster and helps us create concepts that are progressive yet possible to execute.
Words From a few of Our Clients
WE’VE enjoyed WORKING WITH OVER 100 TEAMS. Below are just a few.
5 out of 6 concepts we worked on with Eureka! achieved top quintile NEILSEN scores – and one of the concepts set a new high for our company.
Eureka! has brought much needed discipline to our concept development. They greatly enhance our probability of developing highly successful new products. Using Merwyn makes it feel as if we are cheating!
Our thinking is the barrier to our future growth. We can talk ourselves out of any idea, but Eureka! teaches you to trust your intuition and explore new ideas. If an idea isn’t strong, the Eureka! process will help you figure it out quickly before you waste a lot of time and money. We have been making the same product for over sixty years. This experience gives us the courage to try something new!
Let’s Start Something new
Say Hello!
Drop us a line and we’ll set up a painless 30 minute exploratory call to understand your challange and sketch out a quick project plan of how we can help. (When it comes to innovation – we’re in this together! If we’re not a good fit, we’ll let you know that too and connect you to some other incredible partners that could!)