The future of the future is not the present so only solving for today’s challenges does little to address tomorrow’s unknowns.
Idea Couture’s Futures & Foresight team helps clients understand, anticipate & prepare for the future—applying both research & design methodologies to support present-day decision-making to produce more tangible & compelling narratives of alternative possibilities.
Idea Couture is an in-house strategic innovation & experience design resource to parent company Cognizant Technology Solutions as well as a consultant to external clients across Hospitality, Entertainment, Travel, Retail, Food & Beverage, Grocery, Education, Health, Banking, Finance & Insurance sectors that might be unconcerned with emerging signals of change, misaligned on organizational direction, removed from evolving brand relevance, faced with a saturated market, settled on established projections, or detached from looming future imperatives. Project snippets below.
Sprint to in-depth research & ideation initiatives that translated insights into strategic solutioning of opportunity & risk assessment in areas of high impact & value for organizations. These efforts aimed to align, impact & expand existing capabilities which featured but were not limited to these activities & deliverables:
Causal Layered Analysis
SWOT Analysis
Capabilities Assessment
Innovation Matrix
Market Sizing
Cone of Plausbility
Windtunneling
2x2 Evaluation Matrix
Concept Briefs
Future State Service Blueprin
Product/ Service Roadmap
Prioritization Scorecard
Low-fidelity Rapid Prototyping
The traditional models & established practices that have long defined retail banking services & the broker-dealer role are being reshaped by artificial intelligence, blockchain & data analytics & the evolving role of the broker-dealer in a digital world ushering in opportunities for community pooling, personalized tailored insights on individual financial goals, custom security measures as well as age & ability-specific accessibility requirements to meet the changing demographic patterns, consumer behaviors & preferences for banking.
As climate change, environmental destruction & human labor rights continue to thrust the cocoa industry towards extinction, the legacy of a chocolate confectionary brand is intrinsically tied to the survival of cacoa itself making product development tied to how well organizations can provoke ideas of what sustainability can look like.
As the industry undergoes rapid transformation driven by emerging technologies, shifting customer expectations, competitive pressures, climate change, a declining workforce & limited technological investments, parcel delivery & logistics companies have to wade through a lot of forces at play via products & services meeting more than just one need.
Patients are often faced with an insurance landscape that is complex, jargon-filled & overwhelming. Clarity on insurance coverage, premiums adjusted to unique individual circumstances & the simplification & reduction of ineffective content supported by AI technologies is bringing potential for a more promising member & agent experience.
6+ week long in-house & external research projects showcasing Thought Leadership & Content Marketing pieces & Forecast reports focused on a singular topic & industry. Extrapolation & scenario development inject tangible & visceral weight to future decision-making processes. Activities and deliverables often encompassed:
Mood & Storyboarding
Backcasting
Hero Stories
Future Personas
Inflection Point Development
2x2 Scenario Development
Moodboards
Behavioral Archetypes & Personas
Visual Mockups
Design Artifacts
Scenario Archetypes
Immersive Scenarios
In a world where healthcare continuously strives to deliver better health outcomes, what role will emerging & Metaverse related technologies have in addressing perceived patient limited care options, wide variability in quality of service & other unmet challenges to better reach those that have been under-serviced due to limited geographic or monetary access, prohibitive costs, long-wait times & administrative requirements.
Single-day sprint to multi-day immersions of informal & creative participatory convergent & divergent design thinking exercises. Coordinated Framing, Alignment, Ideation, Short- to Long-Term Visioning & Prioritization sessions with stakeholders, cross-functional client teams & users to gather insights, identify pain points & refine ideas, frame concepts & prototypes that involved these activities, methods & deliverables:
Workshop Design & Planning
Workshop Facilitation
Laddering
Arbitrary Constraints
Brainwriting 6-3-5
Business Model Experimentation
Future State Journey Map & Service Blueprint
Concept Briefs
Prioritization Criteria
Prioritization Scorecards
Strategic Roadmap
A mix of user research, market research, competitor analysis, environmental & horizon scanning efforts that helped to better understand the goals, biases, needs & variables influencing or prone to influence the nature & context of a client's business. These engagements spanned anywhere between 2-3 weeks for RFPs, 4-6 weeks for incubation & 8-10+ weeks for multi-stage projects that included some of the following activities & deliverables:
Behavioral Ethnography
Signal Scanning
Domain Mapping
STEEPV / PESTLE
Futures Wheel
Affinity Diagramming
Thematic Clustering
Insight Development
Trend Identification
Systems Mapping
Interview Questionnaires
Baseline Assessment
Trendscape Reports
Futures Landscape
Drivers of Change
Current State Journey Map & Service Blueprint
The speed at which work is changing means many needed skills are more quickly becoming outdated. Skillscapes are emerging to support the speed, skills & formats for new ways to hire, train, retrain & retain talent.
(hol)istic care is understanding that no patient is alone in their journey & that health & wellness is more than just accommodating for individuals' physical, mental, and social needs but also the collective needs between patients, family members, healthcare providers & caretakers to better understand the challenges & choices for targeted medicinal & nutritional support & planning.
Audiences are actively & passively participating in ways to enhance the game & its outcome—moving the concept of rewards & the value people place on them beyond financial incentive into modes of communication & connection for both players & audiences along the purview of virtual & physical gaming.