What Initiatives Offers
We focus on the fuzzy front end of innovation –
Determining whether ideas should move forward and how to move the proper ideas toward commercialization.
Initiatives thickens high-tech ideas –
We are uniquely creative and technical. We think "out of the box"; yet understand the technical fundamentals upon which new products and companies are based.
Sample Projects Sample Clients
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Finding Ideas
A blank sheet of paper has infinite possibilities.
Initiatives can help you tune up your culture to foster creativity, brainstorming, problem solving and innovation.
Prioritizing Ideas
Ideas are infinite, resources aren't.
One of the most helpful steps toward innovation is prioritization and the realization that all decisions are made relative to everything else.
Initiatives consulting determines what is important to you—considering the idea, the technology, the marketplace, and the business— and constructs a weighted filtering process which repeatedly finds your “best" ideas.
Thickening Ideas
Ideas aren’t “on or off”—it’s all about “thickening”.
Companies often have an "on or off" process around their ideas and projects. There are many ideas at a very early stage (a few lunch table discussions and perhaps a napkin sketch or two), and there are numerous projects that are underway (often multiyear, multimillion dollar projects), but there is an inappropriate level of investigation in between.
Using a repeatable procedure—ideally with your team involved—we thicken concepts. We investigate the markets, competitors, technologies, opportunities and risks in an objective manner so you can better decide whether to keep pursuing the idea or not.
Investigation is also paramount to technology owners wishing to establish fair market prices for their ideas.
Promoting Ideas
Often ideas are not pursued
because they cannot be understood.
New product ideas. New business ideas
Today’s new idea appropriately competes for limited resources that are working on other ideas and solving urgent problems. Engaging others into a shared vision around the new idea is paramount.
Initiatives has extensive experience in shaping a vision and fostering enrollment that converts ideas into effective forward motion.
Patents. Research
Patents and research, by themselves, are not readily "commercializable". While the raw technology may be fantastic, it is much easier to have someone buy into the idea when they see how it:
• Solves a problem or need for society
• Sells into a large potential market
• Fits into a business model (generates return!)
Problem solving. Business process redesign. Program organization...
With our unique balance of creative, out-of-the-box thinking and an acute sense of organization, we help clarify the nebulous. Clients that have a "situation too complex for words" are often amazed at our ability to:
• Understand and clarify
• Organize for action
• Communicate a message to others
• Solve team working issues
• Convert strategy into action
• Capture the backbone content that feeds training and development, information systems, business mergers, technical support...