So what is Design Thinking… and how does it work? At it’s simplest form, Design Thinking is a series of activities that an individual (or a team) can do for creative problem-solving. The practice merges some common methods from the design, engineering and social science fields used to produce “relevant” solutions. You can think of the activities involved like that of a journalist – going out into the streets, interviewing people of interest, capturing photos and videos, creating drafts of a story, refining with editors and eventually publishing for public consumption. And as a journalist (not unlike many professions), they learn about the best angle to approach a story, what they need to capture and what stories will draw the most public attention.

While most of us can blog (myself included), it doesn’t make us a great writer (again, myself included). We might seek out deeper knowledge to hone our craft. The Institute of Design at Stanford, affectionately called the D.School offers a great educational track for those interested in learning more about Design Thinking. This process focuses on mastering 5 main steps facilitators and practitioners can follow to apply to a problem.

These include:

1. Empathize - immerse yourself in the customer world through observation and engagement
2. Define - form key insights that identify problems your team can solve
3. Ideate - explore and capture diverse ideas using inspiration and insights
4. Prototype - visualize top ideas in a physical form, even if it’s only paper
5. Test - share with customers and iterate to refine

This may not seem terribly complex, but following it is another story. One of the most important, yet often skipped over steps is Empathize. Many teams are most comfortable in creating solutions right away. Brainstorming is fun. Doing research? Not so much. Creating empathy exposes our customer’s needs and positions them above our own. Often we tend to put ourselves in the problem, creating ideas that we like, not necessarily what’s best for the customer. Design Thinking forces everyone to capture needs and build relevant solutions that are directly aligned to those needs. Being a part of a team that follows this consistently, establishes a predictable method for new product development, process improvement and many other large business innovation.

While some businesses have formalized a Design Thinking capability (i.e. P&G Clay Street  and Google Ventures), they rely heavily on being “in the room,” guiding teams through activities that generate a lot of great knowledge. The physical “room” may limit participants, limit diverse inputs and even limit the time necessary for ideas to evolve. I’ve often left these sessions drained and thinking our team had great results, only to want to build on them the following day after I had a chance to sleep on it.

To compliment and extend Design Thinking efforts, Batterii’s Project Rooms allow our teams to focus on different problems to solve. Teams can access this room pre-meeting, during to capture ideas, and even post-meeting to evolve the solution. While we value in-person collaboration, this allows our teams to extend the 4 walls… literally and figuratively.

As you evolve your company’s capabilities, please think about how Design Thinking and Batterii can be incorporated to solve problems together.

The post Extending the 4 Walls of Design Thinking appeared first on Batterii.

Kevin Riley, Founder of Health Model Innovation, explains, “I saw a lot of different people solving a lot of different problems singularly, which resulted in wasted energy and disjointed solutions. What we need is a way to engage everyone from across the healthcare spectrum in an open and collaborative forum. With the Batterii Co-Creation® platform, we have a means to tackle this problem correctly.”

Julie Anixter, CEO of Innovation Excellence, states, “Our goal is to approach healthcare stakeholders innovatively and provide a means and a community to ignite ideas and create value to the participants and, ultimately, all of us as recipients of care; we are very excited about the partnership.”

Kevin Riley has designed the initiative to produce meaningful results quickly for both disruptive and sustaining healthcare innovation. The modelH Forum will focus on 3 key areas in healthcare: care consumption, care delivery, and care financing.

Kevin Cummins, CEO of Batterii, states, “Kevin Riley and Innovation Excellence are showing great thought leadership in the modelH Forum by co-creating a better system with so many healthcare professionals. Batterii is pleased to be the platform that will bring these diverse team members together online in a secure, scalable platform where they can share their inspiration and research, build on each others’ ideas and help deliver a manuscript of best practices.”

The newly formed modelH Forum will extend invitations to participate via digital media platforms and personal invitation. A series of challenges will be posted on Batterii with the intent that many different business models will be conceptualized.

About Innovation Excellence
Innovation Excellence is the world’s leading curated content platform for Innovation 3.0 within specific industries and disciplines. Its mission is to improve economic conditions through accessible innovation education and research.

About Batterii
Batterii offers an enterprise SaaS platform that empowers businesses and teams to accelerate collaboration and build inspired solutions. Batterii facilitates the creative process to engage employees, partners and customers and yield better products, ideas and breakthrough innovations. With Inspiration, Insights and Ideas at its core, the Batterii platform allows businesses to access the full creative potential in a small team or a global work force.

About Kevin Riley & Associates
Kevin Riley & Associates is a retail health focused management, strategy and innovation consultancy specializing in helping companies thrive where consumerism and reform-era health care converge. The overarching goal for Kevin Riley & Associates is to create sustainable value through innovating care consumption, finance and delivery business models. Our mission is to lead healthcare transformation through the many innovative ideas of healthcare stakeholders.

The post Innovation Excellence Announces New Collaboration with Kevin Riley & Associates and Batterii appeared first on Batterii.

My journey as Batterii’s CEO began in early 2012 when my wife Laura and I decided to move back to Ohio to be closer to family.  After originally meeting in San Francisco, we enjoyed living and working in Southern California for over a decade.  Prior to my start at Batterii, my career was spent working with Silicon Valley technology firms, Global 2000 clients, and partners across the world.

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to meet Batterii founder, Chad Reynolds.  Chad, an accomplished Cincinnati based entrepreneur, had a simple vision for Batterii:

“Dramatically improve the effectiveness of Batterii clients by extending and enhancing the creative power of their employees, partners, and customers!  Change the way work is done by using the creative process within a SaaS platform and tightly integrated services.”

During the past year, Batterii experienced exciting change, growth, while continuing to learn many lessons. The following is a list of my top 3 takeaways of 2012:

1. It’s all about the Team: your Employees AND Ecosystem of Partners

Hire for diversity and drive to a joint vision.  Batterii has hired some of the most talented engineers, product, and service personnel to shape Chad’s original vision into a reality.  The mixture of creative and analytical talent creates tension through which the best of both worlds can be realized.

Every start up needs support and Batterii has received not only the financial backing, but also experience from CincyTech. The executives and the network of this Cincinnati based entrepreneurial acceleration firm have helped guide Batterii in the delivery of the platform as well as supporting early clients.

2. Focus on Client and Prospect Needs

Batterii’s vision of CoCreation – with focus on front end of innovation – is only realized when clients use the platform to improve their business.  Our clients have not only worked with their own organizations to recognize the need for cultural changes and improvements, but also with Batterii to continuously improve our platform and service.

By listening to clients and improving the platform with every agile release of the software, Batterii has improved the mobile application, the image management, and the evaluation process (to name a few key changes over 2012).

3. Build Transparency into your Company and Products

Not only do our employees use the platform daily, but they understand where we currently stand as a company, and what our roadmap for the future holds.  We continue to share this with our clients and prospects to ensure that we are all committed to the same goals.

2012 was a great year for our entire Batterii team.  2013 will have its share of challenges, but I invite you to join us on this journey as we help our clients collaborate toward success!

Sincerely,

Kev

The post Batterii: Lessons of 2012 appeared first on Batterii.

Trending Themes for 2013:

Communities of Interest (online and offline) 
Bringing people together around a common interest or shared passion is a no brainer, but how can businesses do this when everyone is so busy. Well, the first part is establishing that it’s okay to tinker on passion projects in a safe space that cultivates discovery and exploration. Using digital spaces, such as Batterii’s platform, gives companies tremendous advantages to connect this energy in a productive environment. Communities can be launched around potential growth areas or even areas that might bring people together with a shared fascination. These types of spaces, paired with weekly or monthly creative sessions to discuss and build ideas, can provide a powerful framework for new business innovations.

Moving Design Upstream 
Design continues to make inroads up the innovation continuum. What manifested as “design thinking” methodologies provided designers with a repeatable process that business leaders could relate to and understand. Design will need to make a larger jump in 2013 to continue this. Design thinking is tired. It needs a jump-start that introduces new methodologies and tools into the picture.

Inspiration Management 
2013 will be the year that inspiration emerges as a practice in business. While sites like Pinterest (Social inspiration) and Fab.com (inspired e-commerce) continue to build great online followings, businesses will try to make sense of this cultural phenomenon. The common thread exists in every person’s fascination with curating lists of information for others to experience and digest. Like online museums, inspiration (and the practice of managing that inspiration) will pop-up inside of businesses as a way to share information and springboard new ideas/thinking. Our teams have been working in this space for quite a while, and our Batterii platform is strategically positioned to be here for companies who want to understand its power.

Mobile Consumer Research 
Remember focus groups? Well, they are a changing. Mobile devices have introduced a unique opportunity for consumers to play a more active role in participating in research and solution-building. At Batterii, we use our mobile app by launching missions, where consumers can capture photos and stories wherever they are and submit to a shared space with brands.

Combinatorial Play 
Companies will look to combine inventions to create more novel creations. To get there, the adoption of methods like Combinatorial Play may be employed to get teams exploring by combining two or more features and/or functions into one product that might seem odd at first. Brands will look to create viral products that sell themselves through unique and helpful product descriptions.

The post What Will Innovation Look Like in 2013? appeared first on Batterii.

So, in the business world, why was everyone so enamored with ideas. Every conversation seemed to focus on the next big idea. Software companies capitalized, launching platforms for Idea Management – a way for employees to put their ideas into a digital repository and manage them. While that served a specific purpose, the promise of Idea Management only housed one part of the story, and more importantly, not always where the real opportunities exist.

At Batterii, we believe that building a successful innovation program begins with capturing and curating the things that inspire us – long before they become our next big idea. After all, an idea is defined as a suggestion towards a plan of action. Most often what we have – when we capture content online – are elements that grabbed our attention; things that made us stop to think.

Inspiration is a process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something. Especially when considering a common phrase like “flash of inspiration,” we are referring to the stimulation to do something creative. Right now, some of us function as curators online. We pin, post and share the things that catch our eye, but what do we do with all of these bits of inspiration … all of these things that make us feel something?

Welcome to the emergence of Inspiration Management, and platforms such as Batterii that give companies a continuous connection to share, learn and gain insights from what others are doing in competitive markets. While Inspiration Management is a relatively new concept, it wields tremendous power for any company looking to engineer a new approach to innovation.

Batterii clients curate thousands of assets each month. We covered the activity of Coolhunting in a previous blog post. At a basic level, our clients needed a way to manage their inspiration first, develop hunches, themes, patterns and insights that could be later applied towards building ideas.

Inspiration gets us thinking. We believe that this motivation can come from organizing information to clearly see the puzzle pieces in front of you. For some types of minds, motivation comes from looking at all the different options until something clicks.

Essentially, we argue that Idea Management limits the possibilities of what each of us have the ability to create. So many good ideas get killed in the Idea Management process because those thoughts were not completely developed. They might lack the originality and depth that can come from exposure into multiple sources of inspiration. So, we ask you to look at this area as an opportunity to enhance your innovation initiatives.

Batterii Feature Updates
As we mentioned last week, we are so excited about the new Batterii App for Android scheduled to release early in 2013. Additionally, we are also gaining some great new features including ways to categorize our inspirations. We’ll have more details as we get closer to the release of those updates!

The post Inspiration Management: Organizing What We Find in the World appeared first on Batterii.

A Couple of Highlights

• Companies lack a good perspective on customer needs; nearly 8 out of 10 companies make decisions that take into consideration something other than the needs of their customers.
• Employees opt to satisfy their own needs, or that of the organization, first; often building experiences that target the wrong audiences.

So, what gives?

Honestly, gathering consumer insights is simply not an enjoyable task. Traditionally, this means a company engages a market research firm to sort through large pools of data, bring target consumers in a room for day-long focus group sessions, execute useful rounds of question … the list goes on. The consumer, the company, and even the firm don’t want to be there. What seems like a pretty simple activity is actually cold, tiresome, and in some cases a big waste of everyone’s time. In reality, the consumer only wants to make life a little easier, and companies want to build better products & services … it should be a win-win situation, right?

In an effort to improve this experience (and get better results), we looked at combining mobile technology and micro-tasking to give consumers an easier way to interact and share their lives with brands. We gave consumers the opportunity to expose themselves openly, and see one another’s contributions. Some really interesting things started to happen, like seeing deeper engagement and richer data. Not only did consumers share more, they were willing to build ideas together with companies.

Micro-Engaging Consumers 

Today, the Batterii Mobile App is focused on efficient capturing of photos and stories. Used by brands, agencies, and even market research companies, our App engages consumers in Mobile Missions. A mission is initiated by brand administrators, and launched out to groups of consumers, asking for specific contributions to help inform and inspire learnings. It’s kind of like a simple, pocket-sized research facility. While the basic feature of the App is to capture content, Mobile Missions can gather diverse types of research.

Types of Mobile Missions

Ethnography
Storytelling Through Pictures of a Consumer’s Life
- Includes Objects, Brands & Experiences

Inspiration / Coolhunting
Reporting on Street-Level Trends, Culture & What Creates Intrigue

Creating New Ideas
Defining a Thought or Idea to Solve a Problem

Product Feedback
Sharing an Idea to get Feedback that Improves Value Proposition

Creative Dialogue
Engaging in Conversation to Drive Shared Discovery

Example

Let’s say that we are working with a group of consumers, and we want to understand their morning ritual; what do they do when they get up and head to work. Using the Batterii Mobile App, consumers can document this series of activities through photos and text descriptions. In a very simple, yet powerful way, this content can be synced to a timeline to help map the consumer journey (for an individual day-in-the-life). Imagine having 100 consumers actually map out their morning rituals, along with all of the products they use, their stories, and even new ideas, to help brands make their mornings better. This can be a powerful, yet simple tool to get at insights.

So, Why Does This Matter?

Mobile technology not only makes consumer research fun again, but helps brands use Social interaction to get at shared learnings. Seeing what people capture, what they share, and what they discuss with other consumers is very meaningful for the solutions our clients look to create – and it can happen for anyone.

The post Mobile Technology Offers a Pocket-Sized Research Facility to Engage Your Consumers appeared first on Batterii.

BREAKING DOWN THE TRADITIONAL CORPORATE WALLS

Today’s corporate environment of tightly guarded trade secrets places tough restrictions on team collaboration, especially between people from different entities.

“What companies need to understand is that we have so much more to gain from a collaboration of ideas than we have to lose from sharing [Intellectual Property] IP,” Hoppe said. “Most ideas are created, and then sit and stagnate because we don’t have the right tools or people to complete the job.”

Hoppe sees the future of business thriving if we just break down the corporate walls to collaboration.

“Team collaboration is beneficial for us all [from businesses to consumers],” he said. “I hope to see more shared workspaces, companies solving one another’s problems, and unrelated teams working together.”

He proposed the idea of more incubation houses for various businesses, particularly those companies that each have something different to bring to the creative process. One example he gave was a collection of 4-5 businesses in Grand Rapids that collectively rented the entire floor of an office building so that they could cross-pollinate problems and solutions.

“I would love to see more companies doing this,” Hoppe said. “Companies will do the same thing for years, never diversifying their thoughts, never seeking different perspectives for problems.”

USING COLLABORATION TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

Hoppe told us that most people are not frustrated with the company they work for, but the environment that they work within. Those companies need to tap into the healing power of collaboration.

“When people want to work all night on something it’s because [the project] is fun and inspiring,” Hoppe said. “If you’re seeing this attitude in your staff then you’re using your resources correctly.”

Hoppe went on to say that we all have different experiences that brought each of us to this very moment. Where we grew up, or where we went to school, gave us our unique thought process. This is particularly important during Coolhunting.

“Everyone has something to offer,” he said. “Being different is the point.”

YOU MEAN I WAS COOLHUNTING?

Hoppe said that when we first started sourcing ideas from the world he didn’t even know what he was doing was considered Coolhunting. He would just go looking for ideas anywhere from trade shows to store fronts.

“I was just throwing out a wide net for ideas, and finding inspiration in the world around me,” Hoppe said.

He approached Coolhunting through simply being curious.

“I travel with a phone and a notebook wherever I go,” Hoppe said. “I would go to trade shows that weren’t even related to what I was working on at the time. Nonetheless, these shows provided me with a great deal of inspiration.”

Hoppe’s advice to Coolhunters out in the world, take a lot of pictures.

NEXT STEP, COOLHUNTING PEOPLE

As we continued to talk about sourcing the right tools to build ideas into innovations, Hoppe mentioned the vast importance of having the right people to complete the work. Perhaps companies looking to keep their operations efficient could source the people they need for projects, rather than keeping them in-house.

“Coolhunting innovative people could be the next step to Coolhunting ideas,” he said.

If you’re working on a project that has a specific skill set needed, look to other businesses or even industries for the people you need, Hoppe said, and if you or the other party have any apprehensions about working together just set an agreement on paper for the job before you begin.

USING TOOLS LIKE BATTERII TO COMPLETE THE MISSION

“I have talked up Batterii ever since I learned about the company,” Hoppe said. “We now know that people are going through (or searching for) the creative process naturally on their own, and Batterii offers a place to house those ideas and inspirations together.”

According to Hoppe, businesses need to get on board with collaboration to stay in control of the ideas within their company. People are collaborating, especially the newer generations of workers, and Batterii is a focused and controlled platform that helps companies structure the process while keeping their staff engaged in their work.

“People who are creative and innovative will find ways to collaborate,” Hoppe said. “You don’t want to lose that power, so businesses simply need to structure those people and the creative process.”

Chris Hoppe is a product development engineer with a passion for bringing meaningful and innovative products to market. As an engineer who enjoys the front-end of product design, he gets involved in consumer research, prototype development, consumer testing and ultimately carrying the product into development, and considers himself a bridge between design and engineering.

The post Coolhunting & Collaboration: Our Guest Chat with Chris Hoppe appeared first on Batterii.

CincyTech invests in ideas, and the people who make them come alive.

CincyTech 2012

Other CincyTech Portfolio Companies Mentioned:

Lisnr is changing the way in which fans experience audio, by making music listening interactive.

ConnXus helps to connect businesses with minority and women-owned suppliers to promote diversity in the business world.

Bioformix is working to develop sustainable and better performing adhesives and materials.

AssureRX Health is working to personalize medicine and improve the treatment process.

SoMoLend is changing how small businesses borrow money, and how investors help ideas to grow.

ChoreMonster makes chores fun by engaging and rewarding kids.

The post CincyTech Promotional Video Featuring Batterii appeared first on Batterii.

Have you ever seen an interesting boutique store, or met someone with a really unique style and thought to yourself, wow that’s really cool? While some people are better with numbers, and others with words, I’ve been blessed with the ability to recognize and combine “cool” observations to create something interesting and hopefully useful. To do this, I always start with Coolhunting, an activity that everyone can, and probably already, do.

The above infographic offers a framework that I created to help illuminate the process. It relies on one key philosophy – Inspiration is the Foundation for Innovation.

How To Capture

The easiest place to start is scouting online material that highlights the latest in new products and styles. These are a great source for capturing inspiration from images, features and tactics that others are trying. When you’re ready to up your game, get away from your desk and explore your city. Look for interesting shops, talk to unique people, and seek out experiences that might even make you uncomfortable. Search for things that make you ask questions.

While we have the tools to capture pictures, our observations rarely make it to inspire others on our team. I wanted a way for my team to share what they were finding, so that we could build on ideas together. Batterii’s set of digital tools, like Web clipper and iPhone App, helped us to capture these observations, view them in real time, and use them in all phases of our idea creation. For me, this was a huge step towards aligning any team looking to build an innovative solution. This is where things get really interesting

How To Curate

Ideas are often churning before we even walk into a brainstorm session. Typically this is because our minds are constantly combining various observations we’ve experienced throughout our lives in an attempt to solve the problem before us. These observations might include articles we’ve read, or the way Starbucks writes the names on cups to make it personal. The observation is two parts: realizing it exists, and then capturing it.

While the traditional term of Coolhunting focuses on discovering new social trends, it’s a rather limiting outlook of what’s really happening. The Coolhunter of today (yes, you) should look to capture three distinct dimensions of the world around you:

Tactical Observations that define a fit in the market, including strategy and frameworks.
Physical Observations that define the function, including look and feel.
Sensorial Observations that define the feeling or experience.

For me, these go even further into descriptive categories that help me create better ideas, and are demonstrated in the infographic above.

Tactical
Systems – Framework to organize data (The Enneagram Diagram)
Market – Targeting a specific audience (price, message)

Physical
Face – Graphic/Aesthetic appearance, including type, color, texture and symbol
Form – Positive and negative space (package)
Feature – Guiding usage and behaviors (user experience)

Sensorial
Experience – Sensory effect over time and touchpoint, including empathy (The Starbucks Experience)
Meaning – Defining a purpose through the message (Tom’s Shoes)
Lifestyle – Connecting people, place, things and time and behavior, ethnography (Hypebeast)

How To Connect

After you have captured and curated these observations, you can then go through some sense-making activities. The goal is to narrow these down by looking at some key insights around the lifestyle & desires of your target audience. Select a few observations and why you chose them (i.e. I love the typeface of this brand, but combined with the texture of this surface). You want to create a visual (or text-based) collage of ingredients for your idea (often referred to as Inspiration Boards or Mood Boards). These provide a vision to help inspire your team to define a fit, fuction and feel for your solution.

Coolhunting is very effective in accelerating the ideation process. The ideas that result can align to a target audience and market, but also lead to disruptive concepts. One method to do this is called Combinatorial Play, but I will save that for a future post.

Happy Hunting!

The post Elements of Coolhunting appeared first on Batterii.

Our world is at a peak of information sharing. Our brains take in more thoughts, sounds and images per minute than any generation before, so it’s understandable that we’ve numbed to the excitement of seeing things that inspire us.

In a recent Lifehacker Article, writer Thorin Klosowoski spoke with journalist and psychologist Maria Konnikova, author of the upcoming book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. We wanted to share the brilliance of this article with you because it emphasizes two core values of Holmes’ expert detective skills that we find very important for Coolhunting: Observation & Deduction.

According to Konnikova, most of us don’t pay enough attention to the world around us. What makes a detective good is the ability to notice the small details. Konnikova suggests this is all about making it a habit to be mindful of our surroundings.

“It’s important to note when talking about Holmes that he has spent a lifetime cultivating the habits of mindfulness,” Konnikova said. “He wasn’t just born with this ability to be in touch with the world. What we choose to notice or not notice is a way of framing it in our own mind. We have a lot of bad habits in our mind, and we have to retrain ourselves to really notice the world. Everything we do rewires the brain, but we can rewire it in a way that mindfulness eventually becomes less of an effort.”

She goes on to say that, as humans, our worst habit is that we simply don’t fully pay attention anymore. We try to get things done quickly, and because of that, we lose the childlike wonder of focusing on the smaller details and asking questions. So, like any habit, increasing your powers of observation means first identifying your bad habit (you prioritize getting things done fast and miss the small details), and cultivating new habits (slowing down and paying attention).

The first step is to just stop and focus on the world around you at least once a day, and there are other things that we can do to train our brains for better observation.

Set Monthly or Daily Challenges That Force You to Slow Down

The trick to starting a new habit is to keep at it. Set a goal to document something new in the world every day. The idea is to gradually teach yourself to notice small details in your environment. As you do so, you’ll become more likely to notice something different or out of place – these are often the starters of innovation.

Take Field Notes to Focus Your Attention

If you’re really struggling to stay focused on the “now,” and personal challenges aren’t working, scientists have another trick:  start taking field notes throughout the day. Write descriptions or draw pictures of anything that noticeably catches your eye.

Analyze What You See or Read, Ask Questions, Research Answers

Once you write down your observations, consider your opinions of what you saw, and write down the questions you have after reading those notes. Not only will this start the process of ideation, it will solidify those ideas in your head for longer.

Form Connections Between What You See and What You Know

Of course, all the increased perception and critical thinking won’t do you any good unless you start making connections between the knowledge you have and what you see.

“It’s not necessarily that Holmes remembers more, but that he can see connections that people usually miss, Konnikova said. “People think Holmes is this paragon of logic, but that logic is innately imaginative at its core. He doesn’t think linearly, he engages his entire inner-network of possible connections.”

Once you start paying close attention to the world, you can turn your observations into theories or ideas. Deduction is about thinking through a situation logically, and then applying critical thinking to what you’re seeing.

Visit our blog again early next week as our Founder Chad offers his expertise in defining Coolhunting and implementing it into the way we create. We will also talk to Innovation Engineer, Chris Hoppe who suggests that the evolution of Coolhunting is leading to a new way for companies to work together.

The post Coolhunt with Holmes-Like Observation & Deduction Skills appeared first on Batterii.