We mentioned in an earlier post how relying only on category expertise for ideation can be tricky because it comes with blind spots - unconscious biases that can narrow your vision and potentially minimise the opportunities you see. Yet it is essential to bring it to life opportunities. It can even push the ideas from good to great and we had a lovely example with a project we did for a global leading paper company.
The central challenge revolved around the need to bring superior functional benefits to an extremely commoditised category, that was driven primarily by custom made order for otherwise totally standard tissue paper products.
The roadmap we developed with the team generated a raft of exciting ideas, most of which brought new functional benefits into the category. After we generated these ideas we went, as we often do, into what we call Silo: a period of focus on category expertise, because we’re looking to explore how to bring the ideas to life.
As part of the silo work, the team was able to actually further push one of the ideas, exploiting unique aspects of our clients’ business - in this case, connected to how they were vertically integrated and the raw materials were sourced close to the factories. The team was able to push an idea that was originally planned as “carbon neutral” into “carbon positive” by exploiting unique know how they had in the category, in terms of forestry management and pulp processing.
So you see, Category Expertise is central to creating and delivering the breakthrough solutions generated with Controlled Disruption.
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