Risk-Averse Approach to Innovation & Business Growth
We all know that now is the time to innovate or pivot your business.
However, time and resources are tight right now, so we can’t afford the risk.
We offer ideation and development services that fit your budget and help you reduce risk.
Our APPROACH
But you can jump in anywhere in the process.
STRATEGY
We start by setting the strategy to gain team alignment and purpose.
With the recent increase of working remotely, teams need alignment and focus more than ever.
Having a clear mission and constraints keeps the team focused on creating actionable ideas for your business.
STIMULUS
Once we have an objective, it is time to gather stimulus and pick the best tools to use.
We have 6 types of stimulus mining and dozens of tools that help us generate ideas. We choose the right combination for your challenge, timing and budget.
SESSION
We facilitate the session and capture all the ideas online after using each tool. The team can build on each other’s ideas to create even more ideas.
Sessions can range from 2 hours to 3 days depending on your challenge.
SURVEYS
To reduce risk we test ideas to see which are the most meaningful and unique to customers.
We learn who likes each idea and how to make each idea better. Our survey systems allow us to test more ideas to discover the least risky paths to success.
SALES
Learn how much money each idea could make using our 5-year sales forecasting tool.
Quantifying the value of all your ideas to the company helps decide which ideas move forward.
Sales forecasting also allows you to test alternative business models to discover the most profitable approach.
SPEED
With the pace of change today, you have to be able to develop and ship ideas 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!
Innovating is the best strategy for growing your profits.
Our specialty is transforming non-innovators into innovators.
So we know we can get you moving in the right direction today.
And with our customizable approach, we can now work with you regardless of your timing or budget
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.
Contact Us
we help COMPANIES invent BREAKTHROUGHS, BUSINESSES & BRANDS
Done Virtually or In-Person
Products & Services
High growth companies have a full pipeline of exciting new products & services. And we happen to specialize in creating those very things.
Fact: The average American home has 18 products we’ve helped create.
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.
Fact: Many sessions produce 1 or more provisional patents.
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!)