Future-Led Innovation Workshop
Use alternative futures to uncover innovation opportunities that conventional planning is likely to miss.
Most innovation starts with what the organisation already knows. That can produce useful improvements, but it rarely reveals the opportunities created by deeper changes in markets, customer needs, technology and society.
The Future-Led Innovation Workshop challenges today's assumptions. Your team explores genuinely different plausible futures and uses them to discover new sources of growth.
- Reveal emerging and underserved customer needs.
- Challenge assumptions about your market and business model.
- Identify opportunity spaces across alternative futures.
- Generate new products, services and business-model concepts.
- Work backwards from attractive future opportunities.
- Prioritise ideas according to attractiveness, feasibility and strategic robustness.
A structured Future Innovation Portfolio containing:
- Near-term experiments that can be tested quickly.
- Medium-term innovation opportunities.
- Longer-term strategic options.
- Priority concepts and recommended next steps.
- Assumptions and indicators to monitor as the market evolves.
These are not academic foresight exercises. Methods such as horizon scanning, STEEPLE analysis, scenario planning, stress-testing and backcasting are selected because they improve the quality of strategic decisions.
Each engagement is focused on the client's actual market, strategic questions and management priorities. A 30- or 60-day follow-up session can be included to review progress, assess emerging indicators and refine the next decisions.
Make uncertainty strategically useful.
You cannot predict every disruption. You can build a strategy that is better prepared to respond and a portfolio of opportunities designed for more than one possible future.
What typically triggers this workshop?
A recognition that today's core business will not carry the organisation indefinitely: growth flattening, a category changing shape, or an innovation effort producing activity without direction.
It is also used when a leadership team agrees that change is coming but not on what to do about it.
How is this different from the resilience workshop?
The resilience workshop protects the strategy you already have against disruption. This one starts from where the future is heading and works backwards to the opportunities worth creating now. Many organisations run both, in either order.
How long does it take and who should attend?
Normally a single intensive day with preparation beforehand, in person or remotely. It works best with the people who can commit resources: the executive team, business-unit leadership, and those who would own any resulting initiative.
What do we leave with?
A prioritised set of future-led opportunities with the reasoning behind them, the assumptions each one depends on, what would have to be true for it to work, and a first set of owners and next steps.
Can it be run in Spanish?
Yes. The workshop is delivered in English or Spanish.