One Simple Thing to Level Up Your Innovation Efforts
Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash
A lot of front-end innovation initiatives start with trend scans, horizon scans, or some focused scanning of the external environment. But those scans don't always wind up producing the results that teams are looking for.
Too often, teams are left with familiar trends that lead to familiar innovation ideas.
If you’re frustrated by lacklustre innovation, this one simple thing can make all the difference:
Cross-impact analysis.
You don’t see a lot of this from agency trend analysts, and I get it. They’re strapped for time, and often working in roles that resemble a sort of strategy sweatshop. So, Instead of doing any sort of bespoke or client-specific trend analysis to front-end innovation work for clients, you get a handful of pre-developed trends and signals copied and pasted into your project context.
This is fine, to a point. But I’d be annoyed if I was paying for it.
And, it overlooks where the real value in trend scanning to inform innovation actually comes from: The space in between the things typically labelled ‘trends’ and ‘signals’.
Cross-impact analysis is a foresight method used to explore the interactions and causal relationships between events and signals, and to understand their combined impact on the future.
In other words, it’s all about exploring how trends influence or might be influenced by one another and what that means for emerging/future innovation contexts.
The basic principles of cross-impact analysis date back to the late 1960s, but the original processes were relatively simple and were based on a game design. Eventually, advanced techniques, methodologies, and programs were developed to apply the principles of cross-impact analysis, and the basic method is now applied in futures think tanks, business settings, and the intelligence community.
Here's how it works in an innovation context:
Identify Key Factors - Instead of finding trends and just serving them up. Think of them as key factors that are relevant to the space you're looking at. They’re the start, not the end.
Assess Interactions - Explore the potential interactions between those factors, and consider whether they have a positive, neutral, or negative impact on one another.
Develop Scenarios - Explore different combinations of factor interactions and think about their potential outcomes. How might they shape the potential future?
Analyze & Interpret - Lastly, think about what this means when it comes to opportunities and risks in the space you’re focused on. If the goal is to help a client think about the future, THESE are your future-focused trends.
Here's a back of the napkin example: Imagine you're an alcoholic beverage company thinking about expanding into the marijuana space with a canned ready-to-drink beverage. There are plenty of products available to consumers in that space already, so your market entry would need to be different.
The convergence to two trends can take you somewhere new...
The "less but better" trend in drinking, where consumers are opting for fewer, higher-quality alcoholic beverages.
And, the terroir trend in the cannabis industry where brands are emphasizing the unique characteristics that come from specific growing regions, soil compositions, climate conditions, and cultivation methods.
Taken together, you might imagine a future scenario where alcohol alternative beverages are made in a similar way as wines. Unique vintages. Premium, and ultra-premium labels that create different tiers of quality and prestige.
This could then lead you down a path toward thinking about new sort of premium and prestige alternative products that aren't just 'me too' ready-to-drink canned THC/BCD infused beverages.
So next time you’re scanning, reviewing a scan, or considering a proposal from an agency, ask yourself: Are these recycled trends, or this actual analysis to discern what is changing in the world and what it could mean?
The former will lead you down the same path as everyone else.
The latter can actually help you navigate uncertainty and go somewhere new.