the early bird catches the worm: dig deep to discover innovation

Sunday||November 11, 2007

Half-day workshops 2:00 – 5:00PM

Arrive on Sunday and get the full event experience.
These three-hour sessions give you time to explore a topic in-depth.

Trend Spotting in the Age of Social Media

• Michele C.S. Bowman, Managing Director, Global Foresight Associates
• Sandra Burchsted, Director, Prospectiva

We are transitioning from the age of mass broadcast media to the age of social participatory media.   As social media gains momentum, understanding the social life of ideas - mapping where they emerge and how this migrate throughout society - will be the new coin of the realm and new futures scanning tools will be required to identify and track trends. 

Social media websites such as YouTube, Technorati, Diff, Flickr, Stumble Upon and Myspace are rich virtually untapped fresh resources for identifying, synthesizing and analyzing trends.     To stay ahead of the curve you will need to become fluent with the tools and language of social media.    

In this interactive workshop you will:

• Experience a hands-on tour of the most important social media sites
• Learn how to identify and track trends by tapping into the rich resources social media websites such as Technorati, Diff, Digg, Flickr, Stumble Upon, MySpace and blogs offer.
• Review a case study on a collaborative social media project that is designing a visual database of trends using images and photographs
• See how we use an ethnographic framework for understanding the implications of these emerging trends.

Michele's work focuses on helping organizations understand the strategic implications of trends and emerging issues affecting the future of business and society. Her ideas and expertise help organizations innovate existing products, identify new areas and markets for growth and create strategic maps of the future. She is the Executive Director of the Association of Professional Futurists, president of the Boston Chapter of the World Future Society and co-host of the popular futures podcast FringeHog.

Sandra is particularly known as a futurist who identifies nascent trends.  She has successfully helped clients in both the private and public sectors conceptualize the "so what" of these weak signals so they can innovate, transform and capitalize on the emerging future. She helped found the Association of Professional Futurists and served on the original board of directors.

Capturing Innovation: 10 Steps for Creating Products and Services that Deliver on Met and Unmet Customer Needs

• Javier Flaim, CEO, Markitecture
• Luisa C. Uriarte, Partner, Markitecture

From Six Sigma to StageGate, many organizations instill processes to try to capture ideas from both within and externally to drive organic growth. We believe that success comes from creating a process that has one purpose in mind: finding the right target and developing core products and services that meet their needs – both met and unmet. The question becomes how. We will cover a simple 10-step process that any organization can easily implement that drives to this outcome. We will methodically work through this process and highlight innovation best practices through each of these 10-steps.

• Guidelines on how to promote an "innovation culture" at an organization.
• Identify a repeatable, successful process for innovation development.
• Suggest metrics to measure success over time.

Javier brings over 15 years of marketing strategy experience, specializing in launching and repositioning new products and brands through multi-channel communications for clients such as JP Morgan Chase, Hess, International Paper, Eastman Chemical, BusinessWeek, Cuisinart, Chicago White Sox and Investools.

Luisa has nearly 20 years of experience in managing research and consulting projects of international scope, covering more than 30 countries worldwide. She has directed a wide range of segmentation, new product development, public relations and public opinion polling studies for multinational clients like Coca-Cola, Burberry, Crayola, and the Dubai Holding Company.

Monday|| November 12, 2007

Full-day ethnographic adventure 9:00AM – 4:00PM

Go deep during the full-day ethnographic journey to one of the
best places for spotting trends – South Beach.

Ethnographic Adventure to South Beach: How to Observe Behavior to Detect Trends

• Ruth Sando, Ph.D., Cultural Anthropologist, Barbara Perry Associates

Leave your business attire at home and join a cultural anthropologist on a voyage of discovery into the latest shopping behaviors in one of the trendiest hotspots in the world – South Beach. In this experiential full-day workshop, you will learn by doing … and will have fun. You will begin at the hotel with a briefing that will cover the basic "how to's" of ethnographic immersion and tracking skills. Then you'll receive your top-secret team missions: small group assignments that will send you out to explore various retail environments in SoBe: restaurants, shops, luxury boutiques, etc. At the end of the day, you'll return to the hotel for debriefing.

What you'll learn:

• Basic theory and principles of ethnographic immersion
• Skills of tracking, including slowing, looking down, and expanding perceptions
• Using this approach to generate new insights and creative thinking
• Reading the clues that signal new trends
• Observing shopper behavior and garnering keen insights into why consumers do what they do

(transportation to and from South Beach will be provided)

Ruth is a Senior Associate with Barbara Perry Associates, a firm that has brought the perspective and methods of cultural anthropology to Fortune 500 companies across a broad variety of industries. They are pioneers in the use of ethnographic methods, both internally for managing change and externally for getting closer to the customer. She is a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology.