Professors meeting consumers to invent the future

Over a period of several years I have helped some of our biggest consumer goods multinationals to develop visions, missions, strategies and key projects for their R&D efforts. In several of these we explored the broad areas of healthy ageing – including genetic engineering, antioxidants, nanotechnology and a host of other topic areas.

One of the key issues that had to be addressed was how to blend together some of the world’s leading research scientists, some of them Nobel prize-winners, with sets of relevant consumers (together with marketing management, outside experts and journalists, and the companies’ own R&D scientists).

Very diverse groups like this usually need help in discovering that at root they are all human beings with families, friends, futures and common values. When they are asked to work creatively together, they need to find common ground and common language in order to explore possibilities, walk into the future together, develop new ideas and problem-solve.

Moreover, in situations like this, one of the greatest challenges is to persuade all the participants that their thoughts are of equal validity. For example, consumers can and often will relegate themselves to observer status, while Professor X from Harvard or INSEAD gets into lecture mode, holding forth as though he or she has all the answers.

The future is a foreign country

The re-positioning of many traditional market research departments as “insight” providers has made a lesser contribution to successful innovation than might have been expected.

There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps the main one being that supposed “insights” often result from looking into what is in effect a rear-view-mirror.

What is needed, of course, is a way of walking into the future (together with customers, consumers, suppliers, experts etc) and gaining insights from that perspective. I think this is better described as “foresight”. And it’s not a good fit with people who have a strongly rational and logical cast of mind.

After all, nobody knows exactly what the future will hold. What we do know is that it will be different from the past. So walking into it is fundamentally an imaginative exercise – a new perspective from which fresh innovations can be created. And to do it well, it needs radically different methods.

To adapt LP Hartley’s famous opening sentence in his novel, The Go-Between: “The future is a foreign country: they will do things differently there.”