TOOLS

Design ethnography is an open, predominantly qualitative, approach encompassing various research methods aimed at gaining elaborative, empathic and contextualized insights in people’s lives, their behaviour, their values and motivations, rites and artefacts; in other words, their lifestyles. 

An easy-to-follow framework that will help you not only unpack and understand any consumer trend, but also help you apply it to launch successful consumer-facing innovations of your own (Trendwatching.com).

The Value Proposition Canvas helps you tackle a core challenge of every business. It makes explicit how you are creating value for your customers and helps you to design products and services your customers want (Strategyzer.com). 

DART (Driver Analysis – Reading Trends) is a new approach co-developed by Maria Mackinney to organize and develop intuition in the research and development phase of a creative process. In its current form, it targets future designers, trend forecasters, and communicaties (Nordes.org).

Designing meaningful innovations that create shared value for people, organizations and society requires an integrative value framework. The framework is used as a model to create new innovations or to review existing innovations to inspire improvements (Elkedenouden.com).

The Business Model Canvas, is a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool. It allows you to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model (Strategyzer.com).

Glocalities offers a deep understanding of values, cultures, preferences and consumer behavior around the globe. The Glocalities survey provided a sound basis to construct the robust and sophisticated Glocalities segmentatie model (Glocalities.com).

The Empathy Map is a tool developed by visual thinking company XPLANE. This tool helps you go beyond a customer’s demographic characteristics and develop a better understanding of environment, behavior, concerns, and aspirations.

You could look at a trend map as the archive of a trend researcher. A typical trend archive consists of many different (types of) sources. This mixture of material is likely to end up being unsystematic and difficult to work with. A visual trend map provides the necessary overview. It is a tool to categorize your findings. And consequently, by categorizing is also easier to grasp new connections.

The adaptation curve, derived from Rogers adoption lifecycle, is a tool to increase understanding how change is adopted. With this tool we grasp how an idea travels among consumers. The adaptation curve is also way to identify in what way consumers embrace a new idea. In general you could say that the innovators and early adaptors pick up on change easily whilst the majorities need more time to adopt a new idea.

Philips Innovation Services, Industry Consulting has created a unique Value Modeling tool, based on the Value Framework, as presented in Elke den Ouden’s book Innovation Design. This allows faster innovation through rapid analysis of Value Networks, which prompts teams to take an external view and visualize their findings for easy sharing and in-depth discussion. 

(Cocd.org)

Serious Concepting distinguishes 4 pretotyping test formats that have to be created for testing: a storyboard, a conceptueel graph, look & feel and a Business Model Canvas (Strategyzer). Together they create the starting point for pretotyping instruments (Savoia). Depending on the assignment, these formats have varying levels of detail.

The NOW project is a strategic tool grounded in the belief that it is vital to study consumers in their own culturally constructed worlds. The project immerses us into society with deeper insight, builds empathy with the real people that consume our brands, and helps spot opportunity. This tool aims to spark revolutionary thinking in challenging market places. This epic project is expanding across Africa (The-cia.co.za).