Applied
Methodology
Expertise

Innovation

Innovation is our origin. We offer a wide range of services from designing future scenarios through building up the necessary innovative culture and creative competencies to implementing successful innovations in markets.

To identify future opportunities and potential search fields for ideations, we guide our clients from researching trends through designing plausible future scenarios to prioritizing implications. Beyond that we reveal deficiencies in competencies necessary in the future and provide advisory on the subject of organization-specific competence development (e.g., robust leadership, innovation culture, creativity techniques).

At our core is the facilitation of ideation formats combining methods of the two leading schools of thought, function-follows-form and form-follows-function. We facilitate idea generation with a customized set of methods which perfectly fits our clients’ context. By methodologically guiding our clients, we break mental fixedness to systematically find innovative solutions. Ideas converging towards promising concepts benefit from iterative prototyping, generating and synthesizing feedback and continuously learning from key insights. After designing the right thing, our transformation and change expertise ensures that our clients design things right.

WHERE do
we want
to go?

SCENARIO PLANNING

The future is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. Therefore “best-guess” future conditions are no longer eligible. Instead, multiple plausible futures become increasingly relevant. The IICM scenario process enables participants to develop scenarios in a structured way in a one to two day facilitated workshop setting which allows existing trend inputs to be used in order to explore future trends and challenges. The setting allows the assessment of identified option fields and roadmaps.

How do our
COMPETITORS
behave?

BUSINESS SIMULATION/WARGAMING

Change is the only constant! The development of foresight is a crucial activity for any organization, especially in times of increasing dynamism and complexity. Business simulation/wargaming is an interactive workshop format in which participants assume different roles such as competitors, regulators, market/customers and their own company in order to dynamically simulate future business situations. With this approach the IICM aims to gain a deeper understanding of future market dynamics and to anticipate potential competitive actions or reactions.

FROM
WHOM
can we learn? What
SYNERGIES are there?

CROSS-INDUSTRY FORMATS

Systematic knowledge transfer within highly developed industries is recognized as one of the key innovation drivers for organizations. A cross-industry format is carried out with the participation of representatives from different industries in order to share best practices and create transfer services for one’s own organization. IICM takes on the role of a cross-industry networker and methodically accompanies the format to ensure that all participants benefit equally from each other.

WHAT exactly
is the problem?

Problem solving

There is usually no generally accepted view on a certain problem. To fully understand the problem, it is necessary to open up a problem world. IICM offers a holistic problem solving approach, taking into account all relevant stakeholders and their interests. Thus, a certain problem can be targeted from various perspectives which opens up a larger scope for potential action.

What do our
customers NEED?

DESIGN THINKING

Customer-centricity is an ever-present topic when talking about the future development of businesses. Therefore, it is necessary to identify, understand and address the customers’ wishes and needs. Design Thinking is an approach that faces these requirements. It is a process for human-centered problem solving as well as idea generation. IICM uses this form-follows-function method which iteratively considers individual customer preferences, to optimally align strategy, processes, products and services with actual customer needs.

What is
AVAILABLE
to us?

Innovation patterns

In the modern business world, innovation is the foundation of economic growth. Being innovative does not mean generating ideas out of the blue. Innovation patterns are a methodological approach to systematically develop new business models, products, services or processes. By using this approach, IICM focusses on the function follows form principle. This means that an innovation is identified from existing resources by applying innovation patterns.

What does
the appropriate
BUSINESS MODEL
look like?

BUSINESS MODEL INNOVATION

Besides developing new products and services, business model innovation is of major importance for companies to sustain in a constantly changing world. New business models can be identified through a systematic approach. In addition to the necessary methods, IICM offers support during the subsequent development process (e.g. Stage Gate Process) up to testing an MVP (Minimal Viable Product). The long-term goal is to enable the organization to carry out and further develop this process on its own.

How can we
VALIDATE our
business models?

LEAN STARTUP METHODOLOGY

Constantly changing customer demands require short product development cycles. The primary objective of the lean startup methodology is to minimize risks in product or service development at an early stage. IICM supports the experimentation phase which ends up with an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) as well as iterative product releases. Thus, market risks can be reduced and the need for large amounts of funding is being avoided. This “build-measure-learn” approach ensures validated learning which is necessary to build a sustainable business.