Our name says it all. We are about both the stimulation of strategically based creative thinking and the implementation of all forms of innovation.
Innovation Defined: Innovation is the process of envisioning and successfully implementing new ways of doing anything that creates value for an enterprise and its customers.
Innovation requires flexibly disciplined competence in three domains:
Strategic Foresight, Creativity, and Implementation.
Innovation is about the identification of every client’s "Innovation Sweet Spot," where the organization’s strategic intent (Corporate Will) intersects with perceived, unexploited marketplace opportunities, and the organization’s unique capabilities (strategic competencies), to capitalize on them before their competitors do. Only by discovering the intersection of these three domains will any enterprise recognize and be able to leverage its "Innovation Sweet Spot."
Our client programs usually follow one or more of three major tracks:
Track #1 - Strategic Foresight
" If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there"
– The Cheshire Cat to Alice in Wonderland
Innovation is the strategic accelerator of growth and change. It leads an enterprise into the future. To be successful it cannot be haphazard. The strategy for innovation must provide inspirational, aspirational direction for the organization and its innovation efforts.
Strategic Foresight is our process for helping organizations envision their future, then clarify & communicate their strategic imperatives, or “Plays,” for achieving it. Strategic Innovation Plays are those 3-5 key, cross-functional change imperatives that will enable the organization to focus and win in the marketplace.
Track #2 - Project-Specific Innovation
Project-Specific Innovation is Creative Realities’ task-specific process for creating and implementing innovative new, potentially breakthrough ideas.
Since our founding in 1988, Creative Realities has evolved a 5-phased Project-Specific Innovation Process, reflecting our belief that every innovation initiative flows through five distinct stages.
Over the years we have populated each of these phases with an array of services designed to help our clients envision their future and explore exciting ways to make that future real before their competitors do. We custom build their programs from this menu of services.
It’s not just about new products and new services.
It may involve the creation of totally new business ventures, or new ways to manufacture, market and distribute existing products and services. It may involve helping merged or acquired organizations to unite behind a shared vision of the future. It may focus on taking costs out of operations without cutting people. Through the years we have designed and managed client programs in all of these innovation arenas and many more.
Our customized approach to Project-Specific Innovation is critical to gaining clarity and alignment around the task, expanding the view of the possibilities, pushing the limits of opportunities, nurturing fragile ideas, and turning those ideas into value-creating realities.
Track #3 - Internal Value (I.V.) Generation
Creating Cultures of Innovation
In the long run the ultimate goal of any healthy organization must be to develop the skills, business practices, and organizational mindset to constantly innovate and reinvent itself, ahead of the marketplace and competition. We help our clients develop their skills and processes for innovation, and spread both the learning and the enthusiasm throughout the enterprise, allowing innovation to become self-sustaining.
Creating Value through process and skills improvement
We define innovation as the process of envisioning and successfully implementing new ways of doing anything that adds value to an enterprise and its customers. It is not limited to new revenue sources such as new products, new services and new businesses.
It’s about creating meaningful, positive change. The principles for envisioning and implementing change are much the same whether the task is to create a new product or a new way of doing business. Our clients have seen this and have asked us to help them effect positive change in a wide range of internal situations. From changing the way the sales force does business and interacts with its customers, to the global alignment of key internal and external marketing resources. Anywhere there is an opportunity for significant change innovation can be the strategic accelerator for realizing that change.
Improving the Bottom Line
Most organizations are good at incremental “cost reduction.” What they’re not good at is significant step changes. The challenge of creating significant cost or time reduction requires an innovative approach to costs, manufacturing processes, design, etc. Clients have used Creative Realities to help them remove hundreds of millions of dollars in costs from their production costs without headcount reduction.