Welcome to the fourth and final part in our Trend Spotting series, written by futurist and friend of Callaghan Innovation, David Mattin.
Over this series David has show how to supercharge your ability to be a trend-driven innovator, and helped you spot powerful emerging trends that have deep relevance in the agritech space.
If you are coming to this late, catch up previous instalments here:
Pro Tip - Too busy to read this email? Why not listen to this final instalment instead: Listen here
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In this series of emails we’ve taken a whirlwind tour of trend-driven innovation.
In email one we looked at the fundamental building blocks of any trend: change and basic human needs. In two we saw how to spot trends in the wild by looking for innovations that serve basic needs in new ways. And in email three we used a simple method to turn trends into relevant new product, service, campaign and business model ideas.
In this way, we’ve covered the core planks of any trend-driven strategy.
There’s just one component left if trends are to make a real difference to you as an innovator, and to your team and wider organisation.
That is, making a habit of all this. Or, if we want to sound fancy about it, building a culture of trend-driven innovation.
Building this culture is about embedding both (i) a certain way of seeing the world, and (ii) systems to take action on the insights that result.
Get it right, and it means a powerful way to become a future-facing organisation. One that perceives and responds to newly-emerging shifts in the behaviours and mindsets of your customers or clients. And that does this systematically.
So how do you build such a culture?
There’s no one right answer. Your approach will depend on your existing culture, modes of working, team size, and more.
But most successful trend-driven cultures share a few core practises. If you build your trend practice around them, you’ll be off to a great start.
Spot and share innovations
New innovation examples are the oxygen that fuels any culture of trend-driven innovation.
We all see new products, services, apps, campaigns and more every day. If your team is to start spotting and using trends, then harnessing insights from all these examples is key.
The best way to make this happen?
Open a shared online space into which your team can throw the examples they spot. It could be a page on the company intranet, a Slack, a shared Pinterest board, or similar.
Team members should throw in new products, services, online platforms, marketing campaigns and more that catch their eye, along with a few lines on why they found them interesting. Remember, as trend-watchers we’re searching in particular for innovations that serve a basic need in a new way.
Make it the responsibility of one team member to act as the curator of the space — who keeps the conversation flowing, and pushes team members to add more examples!
Trend Day
Once you have a lively space in which to share examples, you need to put them to work. That means using the examples to spot trends, and using those trends to generate new innovation ideas.
To do that, put two team days on the calendar: Trend Day and Innovation Day. These days work well as team off-sites. Announce the event well in advance, and stress their importance to the organisation!
First, it’s Trend Day. Ask each team member to come with at least one trend idea to present to the rest of the team. Each member gets five minutes to talk through their trend, making reference to the innovation examples that brought them to it.
It can help if they throw those examples into a slide deck, to give their talk a little structure.
For a refresher on how we use innovation examples to spot emerging trends, go back to email two.
You’ll end the day with a pot of trends. Ask relevant team members to write up the best ideas. Post them to the innovations space. You’re now building an internal trend platform!
Innovation Day
The second big day is about innovating with the trends you’ve spotted.
Let the dust settle on Trend Day, and then run an online vote to decide on the most promising five trends identified on that day.
Now, bring your team together for a giant trend-driven innovation session. Break into groups of between two and five people each. Allow each group to choose one trend that they want to use as a basis for new innovation ideas.
And then give them 90 minutes to work on that trend using the Canvas that we explored in email three.
After 90 minutes, come back together as a team. Ask each group to present the best idea they generated during their innovation session.
Vote on the best idea of the day, and award the winning group a prize!
You’ll come out of the day with a pipeline of relevant, promising innovation ideas.
Over to You
There’s so much you can do to vary and enrich this approach.
Some team members might want to get together more often to discuss emerging trend ideas, for example. Or to run flash innovation sessions using the trends you already have.
But if you create an online space for collecting innovation examples, and run annual team sessions dedicated to spotting and using trends, you’ll have created a sound initial platform to build on.
It bears repeating: this process all starts with spotting innovation examples, and sharing them with colleagues. Do everything you can to turn this into a fun, rewarding, expected part of the work of your team.
Embed the process I’ve outlined here, and you’ll generate a stream of new innovation ideas. That’s far from end of the line, of course, for any innovative organisation. You’ll then need systems to choose the best ideas and send them into development and prototyping.
That’s the part trend-driven innovation can’t do for you. But what it does is powerful. The system I’ve described becomes a pair of eyes on the horizon, allowing your organisation to anticipate new customer behaviours and mindsets before they roll over you. And a brain, allowing you to imagine new offerings and business models to meet those new expectations.
Given the pace of change unfolding around us now, this ability to see and respond to the emerging future is more important than ever.
It’s been a privilege to be your guide through the world of trends. And it only remains for me to wish you great luck on your journey through trend-driven innovation.
And if you’d like help to spot trends and run the kinds of innovation sessions I’ve described here, I’m only an email away.
