In exploring an innovation opportunity, a futurist will typically probe further into the future and consider a wide range of influential external factors. This approach expands the field of vision and opens up the opportunity space and enabling us to cast a wider net for ideas, which are then brought back to the present in order to be useful.
The value of foresight in stimulating innovative thinking was never more clearly brought home to us than during a recent focus group exercise involving innovative product concepts. The session began by introducing the concepts and asking consumers to rate them. Then, we did a fifteen minute introduction of a future context we crafted using scenario storyboards. The same concepts were re-introduced and re-ranked. It was truly amazing to see the “lights go on” as participants who had ranked the concepts poorly when trying to imagine them in the present, ranked them much higher after seeing the future context. Organizations searching for truly breakthrough ideas have a similar opportunity – to target their innovative concepts against the potential future contexts that their truly innovative concepts are likely to actually exist in.
Provocative Forecasts are one of our many tools for stimulating innovative ideas. We map the system of the future of the topic, and then creating an inventory the key trends and values influencing that system. We stretch our thinking here by tapping the “edges” of research and “outliers” among experts. We then use various clustering techniques to identify the interesting themes that we build into provocative forecasts. We will stretch as far as the client feels comfortable with, keeping in mind that if we stretch too far, we risk losing credibility. We agree on the final candidates typically in a workshop (these are great fun!), and afterwards do any needed follow-up research.
Our goal here is to deliberately exclude the most likely forecasts. We are looking for higher impact candidates that will lead to really significant change. We are trying to challenge the thinking of the team to go beyond what they are already thinking. An example of a provocative forecast we created that proved too provocative involved in produces and services for the home. We called it “Fur People.” It suggested that pets were becoming so important that they would increasingly thought of as people, and their presence would be increasingly important factors in home building and design – pet bedrooms, anyone?
The provocative forecast builds a picture of what a really different future might look like, and with this mental model in mind, innovators can have it and generate ideas that fit this possible future. Thinking about different future possibilities stimulates ideas that would not otherwise emerge. The innovator can take the creative insight and “back it off” to fit with more likely market conditions. Maybe we don’t need pet bedrooms per se, but maybe indoor cats need a more effective way to exercise? The value of the provocative forecast is in getting the innovators to these creative insights that they might not otherwise have come up with.
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