Innovation and Design
Re-envision your product and service offerings to transform.
Trailhead helps your organization tap into latent customer needs that drive innovation, transform your brand, and enable you to achieve sustainable growth. We start by understanding your organization's vision and its customers at the deepest levels, continue with ideation cycles that move beyond the low hanging fruit, and iterate until well defined prototypes are developed to move your organization forward.
Our Process
Define
Goal: To think about the problem, the context, and the assumptions from many angles and reflect on asking sharpened questions.
Key Deliverables: A product or service Design Brief
Discover
Goal: To learn everything we can about the opportunity space. To get into the hearts and minds of your customer through empathy. To understand needs, desires, aspirations. To understand context at multiple levels.
Key Deliverables: A research report and presentation
Isolate
Goal: To synthesize data into core insights, issues, and opportunities. To craft a problem statement that refocuses attention on the problems/opportunities you are striving to address.
Key Deliverables: A redefined set of challenge statements
Ideate
Goal: To tap into group genius and move past the obvious. To generate a large volume of ideas. To determine which ideas have the greatest potential. To begin refining the best ideas.
Key Deliverables: Sketch images of up to 20 concepts.
Incubate
Goal: To allow time for subconscious processing of ideas. Utilize non-linear, non-rational, background mixing of ideas.
Key Deliverables: Refined sketches for voting
Prototype
Goal: To transition ideas into new dimensions. To bring sketch images to life. To fail early to succeed sooner. To revise through learning and iteration.
Key Deliverables: Up to 3 well developed visual prototypes
Test
Goal: To get client and user feedback to support iteration and ongoing development.
Key Deliverables: User feedback report
Why Trailhead?
Cultivating an Innovation Eco-System - A Case Study
Designing and implementing an innovation eco-system to drive transformational change.
Client
Large University in the southeastern United States.
THE CHALLENGE
The University had a small class on innovation that pulled students and faculty together across campus, but it needed to grow, scale, and have bigger impact to sustain the program.
THE SOLUTION
We designed a vision and meta-structure to coordinate innovative offerings on campus, and to increase attention in specified areas. The structure consisted of three sub-units focused on growing and disseminating innovation oriented curriculum, integrating innovation related programs already in existence to create size and scale, and providing a depot for innovation related projects through the creation of an internal innovation consultancy.
THE OUTCOME
In addition to other accolades in its first year, the University was one of fifteen schools across North America (out of 961 applicants) to earn an Active Learning Steelcase grant to support the creation of creative spaces on campus. Such outcomes result from the University’s vision related to innovation and educational transformation.