Innovation Mentoring

Developing ideas can be achieved in many ways. The commonly held image of the innovator is the solitary genius, often a fruitcake with wild white hair, broken glasses locked away in a lab for months on end. A common approach in big companies is to take their most creative people, and challenge them to develop new ideas. This typically falls to either the design or engineering departments. The result, beautifully designed or highly technical products with little relevance to the end user. More recently, frustrated customers with a passion for fixing an issue have been driven to invent solutions, overcoming significant hurdles in the process.

At Bright Light we take the best elements of these approaches and integrate them within a defined, repeatable, process that provides robust innovative concepts. The process starts and ends with real consumers. It is our belief that truly great innovation must come from satisfying a consumer's rational needs and deep seated desires. Can innovation come from a spark of inspiration? Of course it can and does, but it is an unrelaible process that rarely happens when and where you want it to. Product design graveyards are littered with casualties. Starting with the consumer minimises the element of risk developing new products. It does not constrain creativity but, rather channels it.

Consumer empathy is an essential part of the innovation process. This is not the job of the market research department! At Bright Light we think that the best results are produced from a talented multi-disciplinary team (this includes the clients that are actively encouraged to participate) truly empathasing with the end user. To achieve this engineers, designers and project managers go out armed with cameras, guided by subject experts to gain insight. This is not traditional market research but a way of stimulating idea creation with the customer in mind. We also use a variety of tools to encourage the team to empathise with the consumer and tease out deep and meaningful insight.

We have a diverse team of people with very different perspectives. We are curious, passionate and try to look at the world with honest open minds. This contributes to energetic brainstorms where conventions are challenged, and great ideas are born.

We believe that building prototypes is the best way to convert an idea into innovation. Getting your hands dirty is a crucial part of the process, often providing the 'eureka' moment to the team. The degree to which you can prototype will depend on the scale of the project. The detail which you can get to with a complete car is considerably less than is possible for a kitchen implement. The objective however, is to always get to enough detail so that the client can truly understand the user experience, and drive the solution to the marketplace. We supplement innovation concepts with an early cost analysis which adds to the strength of the proposals. A final consumer test of the proposal(s) is conducted to gauge reaction. We are always aiming for a 'wow' response. Why have any other target?