FutureLab Services
Through an integrated approach to Foresight, Strategy, Innovation, and Branding, we help you address the most important and complex business challenges. FutureLab offers a wide range of consulting services, workshops, trainings, and technology solutions to help your organization achieve innovation proficiency and accelerate business productivity.
Foresight : Perspective
Effective foresight yields perspective, that essential quality of clear understanding from which the right actions emerge. Without the right perspective, it's not clear even what problems are the most important ones to think about. To help you gain the perspective you need to be an effective leader in your organization, FutureLab's uniquely experienced team brings an unprecedented depth of understanding of todays trends, what they mean, what's behind them, and where they're headed.
D-Curve Scenario Planning™ is a new and remarkably effect way to look at the future. Instead of trying to make predictions, which are generally wrong and typically very misleading, scenarios of possible futures enable you to explore the many different and critical facets of emerging technolgies, social trends, economic forces, and business patterns. With compelling content seeded by the deep insights provided by FutureLab's proprietary D-Cruve™ model, this approach to scenario planning is being used by our clients in the energy, health care, technology, defense, and consumer sectors to unlock important new perspectives on the future. Learn more...
Painstorming: An Ethnography Master Class is an intriguing new way to explore the experiences that your customers have, by focusing on deeply embedded pain points that can reveal breakthough innovations. PAIN stands for Persona, Activities, Insights and Needsfinding – and provides a systematic approach to engaging with customers, non-customers, potential customers, and future customers to gain a deeper understanding of their needs, desires, attitudes, and behaviors. By focusing on the factors of use (how products and services are used in daily activities), usability (what makes things easy or difficult, including assessing cognitive workloads and perceptual bandwidth), and meaning (the significance of artifacts and actions in the experiences and lives of people, families, organizations, and cultures), we gain important perspectives on present and future realities, problems, and opportunities.
Strategy : Inspiration
There's something amazing that happens when you identify the right strategy, the winning strategy, because it inevitably inspires you to go out and make it happen. Doubt becomes purpose; hesitation becomes momentum; confusion becomes clarity. FutureLab works with your team to clarify the right strategies and inspire the right behaviors.
The Blockchain Design Sprint™ is an accelerated, immersive design session enables you to fully understand how blockchains work by getting hands on experience by designing and deploying an actual blockchain. The blockchain revolution has begun, and it leverages a fresh, inspiring, multifaceted new world of digital ledgers, consensus computing and decentralization that promises to further disrupt the global economy. The blockchain is a tool for disrupting business models, and as the blockchain revolution grows it promises to disrupt nearly every business, including yours. So how can you master the blockchain in a fast and effective way? Based on a very practical, hand-on learning approach, this is a “learning by doing” experience that leverages the powerful design sprint method used by Silicon Valley companies like Google and Nest. Learn more...
The Innovation Master Plan™ is the compelling synthesis of right strategy and effective innovation methodology. It's also the world's most comprehensive approach to innovation management. By integrating the five critical dimensions of innovation performance into a single system, the master plan approach provides the guidance that your organization needs, and clarifies the essential roles for leaders, process managers, and creative individuals and teams throughout your organization. FutureLab will help you craft a Master Plan that's just right for your organization, just as we've done for a wide variety of clients in financial services, education, consumer goods, health care, government, and telecom. Learn more...
The Innovation Audit is a rigorous assessment of an organization's existing innovation processes, culture, and innovation portfolio. The purpose of the Audit, of course, is to compare the existing situation with best practices as reflected in the Innovation Master Plan framework, and the specific output is generally a set of significant recommendations for how to improve both performance and results. We've done Innovation Audits for many organizations in health care, financial services, education, government, consumer goods, technology, and the resutls have always provided critical guidance that enabled senior management to make outstanding improvements.
Dynamic Trend Analysis™ is a very useful way to examine and master the critical trends and driving forces that are shaping the marketplace today, and which will shape it tomorrow. By drawing on deep knowledge in science, technology, economics, business, and culture, the FutureLab team and our broader Innovation SWAT Team partners will help you see the future.
D-Curve Scenario Planning is a compelling way to prepare for the future. Rather than basing your strategic efforts on predictions, which will almost certainly be wrong, the principle of scenario planning is that by anticipating possible futures, and the driving forces that are shaping the world of tomorrow, your executive team will gain a much greater depth of understanding of change, and identify the right actions and initiatives that will enable your organization to be successful in a wide variety of possible future market conditions. This is a proven process that we've used throughout the health care industry, as well as in high technology firms, the energy industry, consumer goods, government, and defense. (The D-Curve refers to our D-Curve white paper, a deeply insightful analysis of key trends and driving forces that are shaping the future. You can learm more here ...)
Innovation : Creativity
You've foreseen the future and you've strategized about what needs to be done. And now comes the creative work of combining insights and intentions in the joyful and engaging creative work of conceiving, designing, building, and launching the new products and services and business models that will shape the future of your organization, and perhaps the future of the market as well. Because the world is changing so rapidly, because your current products and services are likely to be obsolete well before their time, because new competitors are emerging all the time, you must innovate. FutureLab's innovation services can help you find the great ideas, and transform them into marketplace realities.
MindSpark™ is an accelerated, collaborative, divergent thinking workshop for your company's top innovators and executives. It's focused on helping your team unleash its core creativity to generate better ideas and business development strategies. This two day workshop provides unique and powerful new methods to help your team renew, energize and expand your ideation capacity. It's led by Moses Ma, Langdon Morris and Jack Canfield, three globally recognized thought leaders and experts in innovation and peak performance. Learn more...
OS/i - the Operating System for Innovation is the powerful technology solution we've created to help you manage the entire innovation effort. By supporting all three critical lenses, senior management, project management, and creativity, OS/i provides you with the detailed tools and the necessary overview to accelerate your innovation process and significantly improve the results. Some of the key elements of OS/i include:
Branding : Resonance
BrandScan™ is a series of tools, techniques, processes and software that empowers marketing and brand executives to identify brand strengths, weaknesses, brand and business development opportunities and threats… in real-time. Brandscan helps marketing teams tune-up the marketing mix and brand initiatives for the greatest marketing impact, from a consumer perspective. It is toolkit for aligning internal resources and projects in such a way as to have the greatest marketing impact. The Brand Strength Monitor is a custom designed brand tracking tool under development that harnesses the power of an app, social media and dynamic intelligent sampling of internal and external key constituents.
The Big Dig™ is a comprehensive assessment of your brands meaning, character and positioning, desired and actual, from the inside and outside to give the brand management team the perspective needed to map the gap between the current state of the business and its potential. The big dig is a variation of the ethnographic process that first looks at internal values and beliefs driving your positioning goals, then assesses what consumers externally associate emotionally with your brand. The Big Dig is a valuable tool for any company that has never done an in-depth brand assessment. The Big Dig findings and recommendations are aimed at planning your brands category differentiation strategy and in setting new brand positioning goals and initiatives.