Radical growth rarely originates from looking backward. Shockingly, it comes as a surprise to far too many businesses that an industry’s common understanding of history leads to a sea of ‘me too’ value propositions and undifferentiated offerings. And when big ideas do emerge, they are measured against this historical context which dilutes their impact.
Upstream helps leaders cut through status quo thinking and transcend stage gate approaches that kill big ideas. We do this by making sense of projective insights and developing game changing opportunities, communicated in the form of Vision. Our forward approach is at the heart of disruptive innovation.
Front End Innovation Process
Because no two organizational cultures are the same, we don’t subscribe to any one size fits all innovation process. We’ve spent our careers creating the future for businesses across a range of industries. We bring this practical knowledge of proven front end innovation methods to our clients. We help you build a continuous pipeline of front end innovation by working with you to curate and scale the right innovation methods and measurements for your culture. We help you move beyond antiquated ‘stage-gate’ management of front end innovation to portfolio management with customized tools that connect your methods and engage customers throughout. Once in place, we refine and validate your process in the context of real world initiatives.
Vision
Gary Hamel said, “Companies fail to create the future not because they fail to predict it, but because they fail to imagine it”. We help you do this by synthesizing existing organizational knowledge along with cultural and technology trends relevant to your business. Then we bring internal stakeholders, external domain experts and cultural creatives together in customized co-creation workshops to imagine new value propositions captured in Vision narratives. Vision narratives are brought to life with infographics, imagery, videos and prototypes that communicate new business concepts from the consumer point of view. Vision helps you catalyze new businesses by demonstrating the potential of customer experiences that emerge from the integration of product, service and community concepts.