Concept Ideation: Concept Factory^TM

Our multi-day Concept Factory^TM sessions are generally held at our NewProductWorks innovation and product development center. Armed with the platform areas (either identified during earlier ASG work or brought by the client), we bring big ideas to life through “inspired creativity”…the use of "creative sparks" as stimulus for identifying high potential new product ideas.
These sparks are used to stretch the thinking far beyond the typical, and may include:

• The NPW Product Collection (with 100,000+ real products on-site for use as stimulus during structured exercises)
  
• “Trained brains” to help turn thinking “inside out”
  
• Core or ancillary category experts to broaden perspectives
  
• Cutting-edge target consumers who actually show what they want through observable exercises
  
• Innovative ideation techniques and experiences that are designed to maximize group involvement and productivity
  
• Packaging innovation that pushes the limits
  

We follow a flow that moves us from "Seed Idea" to Concept "Skeleton" by the end of the session, with the strongest ideas fleshed-out in more detail, serving as the “raw material” for the concept development effort.

Concept Development

After the Concept Factory^TM ideation session, the ASG/NPW team works together – project leaders, artists, copywriters, and consumer trends/research experts – transforming concept skeletons to “consumer-ready” concepts. With input from the client team, we create strong innovation concepts for use in subsequent consumer research.

Concept Evaluation/Refinement: Consumer Discovery^TM

Once innovation concepts have been developed, evaluation and refinement is done via our iterative Consumer Discovery^TM process. We use this qualitative research/ideation technique to talk to the right consumers, whose input helps assess, enhance, and prioritize new business, product, service, program, or positioning concepts.

How it Works
After each group session, concepts are refined, culled and new ideas generated based on consumer input. Additional and changed concepts are discussed immediately in the next group, so we can be sure the changes are truly improvements. As we approach the end of the process, the strongest concepts will have been clearly identified.

Once the number of concepts is narrowed, attention is placed against how to “bring the concepts to life” through the entire marketing and business mix (product, packaging, shelf placement, etc.), using tangible stimulus where appropriate to elicit more “real world” consumer reactions.

Advantages
This approach is uniquely suited to exploring a wide range of potential concepts, looking for both market potential and actionability. Our creative team, the core consulting team and the client team are all on-site to incorporate new learning as the sessions progress.

Consumer Discovery^TM collapses the normal lengthy process into days, and helps you move quickly from strategy (the platforms) to concepts and how to implement them.