WORKSHOPS
“Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected."
William Plomer
Workshops often get a bad reputation of being a wishy washy waste of time. We understand why that is having been involved in many workshops that seemed to be more focussed on being creative without any connection to reality at all.
Workshops without an objective are just a boring team building event.
We don't have anything against team building events, after all, where else would we have walked on hot coals, wrote and performed a ridiculous rap about our skills and learnt how to make a roller coaster for a marble with nothing more than A4 paper, straws and paperclips!? We do have an issue however with these sorts of activities when there is a serious objective at hand. That is because workshops are an incredible way to develop, create and incubate ideas when they are created properly.
The term 'Co-Creation' has been thrown around for a number of years as a way of utilising workshops as a medium to engage with real life customers to create the next new thing. Whilst it is a good technique, it isn't the be all and end all of what can and should be achieved in a well thought through and structured workshop.
We use workshops in a wide variety of ways throughout our innovation process including at the 'Create' stage where we would design a workshop to meet the needs of the specific area we were looking to develop ideas within as well as later on in the process where we conduct workshops where products can be developed through understanding consumer appeal.