💡 Why Is Now the Perfect Time for Ideation?
As we navigate these challenging times across different industries like transport, travel, retail, hospitality and interior design, now is the perfect time to reimagine, redesign and work on a new plan for your business model, product development, go-to-market strategy, branding, sales and operations. Being a practising management consultant and educator, our founder has had first hand experience in witnessing the design challenges of which our clients are experiencing. Most recently, many of our retail clients have been struggling to mitigate the disruption from the prolonged Covid-19 pandemic and the shift in consumer purchasing behaviour from offline to online. They are looking to design an omni-channel retail experience in the likes of Phoon Huat’s transformation with the introduction of their e-commerce platform which served the needs of their consumers during the islandwide lockdown.
A study conducted by Adobe found that companies which foster creativity achieve exceptional revenue growth compared to their peers. Despite the exceptional revenue growth creativity can value-add, 61% of companies cannot envision how and when they might bring out creativity during innovation sessions. Many corporate employees do not possess the confidence of being creative. Using Design Thinking, we have helped our customers to unlock their organisation's creative potential. There has always been a widespread misconception that creative leadership merely entails becoming more creative. In fact, creative leadership is all about having a curious mindset - challenging long-standing assumptions, inspiring your team, keeping your options open and triggering reflection. By adopting a curious mindset, you will be able to empower your team to think out of the box and come up with novel, innovative solutions.
💡 How to Ideate?
🧠 Divergent and Convergent Thinking
Design Thinking involves a series of divergent and convergent steps. Divergence is about creating choices. In this phase, you would have to cast your net wide by generating as many ideas as possible. At VK Transformation, we find it extremely effective to ask “How Might We” or “What If” questions which have the potential to spark productive ideation sessions, leading to innovative campaign ideas. In order to come up with a fresh, creative solution, you would need to break away from the status-quo and go beyond your comfort zone. Though you might feel like you are regressing and drifting further away from the answer, divergent thinking would actually give rise to unexpected, ingenious ideas. After divergence, it’s important to converge the ideas as convergence is about making choices. When you put on your convergent thinking cap, you would have to narrow your focus by developing selected ideas and concepts and synthesising information. By utilising both divergent and convergent thinking, you will be able to transcend the obvious with new-to-the-world solutions which place your consumers’ needs and challenges at the forefront.
Here at VK Transformation, we have successfully transformed both B2B and B2C brands and business models by using a customer-centric approach to problem solving which is the core of the design thinking process. If this resonates with you, we would love to share more about how design thinking can accelerate revenue growth over a cup of coffee. Let us know your availability here: https://www.vktransformation.com/contact-us