Idea Couture has a robust framework to help create business scale, scope and positioning in the value-chain. Our business model development considers all players in the business ecosystem, including customers, suppliers and competitors. Through customer centricity and purposeful design, we review and challenge the strategic assumptions of our clients, re-frame the role of the company within the value chain and re-define how to addresses unmet or unarticulated customer needs. This might involve an application of technology or service design that can displace the present market leader, create an entirely new market, or even add a "second bottom line" like social innovation.

Whether designing a product, service experience or business model, rapid prototyping is at the heart of our methodology. We use simulations, illustrations and semi-functional models to quickly assess viability, test business concepts, mitigate risks, facilitate strategic discussions, gather early user feedback, establish performance benchmarks and project future performance. Our prototyping process creates tangible futures that bring insights to life.

The most complex, interesting and potentially transformative solutions lie at the intersection of engineering, design and human sciences. The launch of a successful product is a multi-faceted puzzle, and every member of our team brings a different piece to the workshop or the boardroom, including perspectives on product features and functionality, ergonomics and usability, branding and positioning. With interdisciplinary teams that understand social, technological and corporate landscapes, Idea Couture helps companies envision and create breakthrough products that fulfill user needs and forge lasting connections between customers and brands. Our talented team of designers can transform any product or idea into a market leading solution with genuine competitive advantage and consumer appeal. In addition to new products and categories, our toolkit can also be applied to innovative product line extensions.

Idea Couture specializes in helping clients transform brands into experiences, by developing multi-layered services that reach consumers through multiple digital and real world touch-points. Service design can be both tangible and intangible. It can involve artifacts as well as communication, environment, behaviors and the specification and construction of technologically networked social practices that deliver value to consumers. Whatever form it takes, our service design is always engaging, consistent, easy-to-use and has strategic purpose. Designing customer interactions is a great opportunity to create deeper brand relationships and long-term customer relationships, by delivering dynamic engagement and emotional value.

Idea Couture understands that with today's ever-growing proliferation of consumer electronic products, systems and screens, human interfaces play a pivotal role in defining the quality of customer experiences and overall competitiveness in the marketplace. Whether a touch screen, mobile device or appliance, our multidisciplinary team of designers and human factors specialists employ principles of user-centered design to create elegant and effective interfaces that harmonize functionality and usability for efficient interaction and positive experiences.

We create interfaces that are intuitive and unobtrusively designed for users to accomplish goals without unnecessary effort or frustration. Core to our design approach is an unyielding focus on users and their real needs. Our human factors specialists methodically deconstruct and analyze user goals and associated tasks, for insights on requirements that inform the interface design. With these design and usability requirements, Idea Couture's interface designers draft and refine prototypes of ever-increasing fidelity, from early stage sketches to fully functional digital artifacts. Our usability experts develop and conduct rigorous contextual testing to ensure that the architecture of action/reaction events enables users to instantly recognize how to best accomplish tasks.

Interactive design is a fast evolving discipline and one of the most important components for companies to build meaningful engagement and sustainable differentiation, as part of their experience strategy. Idea Couture fills a void in the marketplace between strategic consulting firms that typically lack an understanding of the ever-changing digital ecosystem and interactive agencies that usually lack business rigor and corporate strategy competency. Simply put, we architect interactive initiatives that look great and have purpose. Our approach is "platform" and our process "agnostic". We utilize the frameworks that best support each project's needs and we integrate and scale the digital roadmaps of our clients. And we utilize qualitative and quantitative methodologies that measure and analyze the metrics that optimize performance long after launch.

Idea Couture believes that social media is much more than blogs, forums and social networks. It encompasses social commerce, co-creation, wireless interactions, conversations, collaboration and other methods of exchange and interchange. As connectivity increases and social platforms open up, the opportunity for consumers to socialize brand interactions will increase exponentially. Beginning with a comprehensive social media audit, Idea Couture works with clients to create a plan that identifies and engages advocates, increases engagement and benchmarks performance on an ongoing basis to support organizational objectives.

Ethnography is the art and science of telling stories about people's stories. It's how our anthropologists study and tell stories about people in the spaces and places where they live, work, play, shop, eat, and imagine the world around them. Drawing on the inter-disciplinary research methods and social theories that frame every project, our teams seek to identify insights that provide a critical lens and insider perspective on the beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes that drive consumers and shape their cultures and communities.

Ethnography reveals customer narratives where surveys find only data. It relates dreams, hopes, histories, memories, fantasies, experiences and performances of everyday life, while focus groups offer opinions. We engage real people in real situations—where market research creates speculation, ethnography fuels innovation.

Customer Co-creation Labs are exploratory sessions designed to identify and examine consumer behaviors, motivations, needs, opinions, attitudes and ideas. Conducted as informal peer-group conversations, they empower customers with an active voice in designing the brands, experiences, and engagements that will best fit into the context of their lives. Through co-creation labs, we directly bring customers into the early stages of the innovation process, empowering them to help shape the final outcome and mitigate downstream risks. Our labs are planned, designed, and run by a multi-disciplinary team that includes anthropologists, designers, human factor specialists, and usability strategists. This inter-disciplinary approach guarantees that many unique perspectives, lenses, and personalities connect the diversity of customer feedback during and after creative sessions.

Customer Context Labs are an alternative and antidote to focus groups. Drawing on ethnographic interview techniques to identify and describe consumer motivations and experiences, they yield actionable insights and prototypes through observing and decoding talk and social interaction. Hosted in natural settings rather than behind 2-way mirrors, they are designed to facilitate group discussion where target consumers use concepts to reveal the social, cultural and personal contexts where products and services come to life.

Global Scanning & Context Framing are key to understanding the potentials or variables that contribute to the design, development, acceptability and adoption of new products, services and systems. We research, collect, compile, compare and evaluate a wide range of signals to identify new areas of near-future business opportunity. Idea Couture taps into its global innovation network in Sao Paulo, London, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, New York, Amsterdam and Barcelona to unlock and understand the new and emerging languages, cultures, customs, ideas and needs that drive innovation. Global scanning offers our clients a detailed review, analysis and synthesis of promising ideas, growth opportunities and raw materials to inform and drive innovation.

We provide new framing tools that help organizations see little pieces in new cohesive ways and see ideas at the intersections of different worlds that have never previously been combined. These compelling intersections are where the big opportunities of tomorrow lie, looking at the landscape with new lenses to identify emerging market opportunities. Each scanning and framing exploration is unique, sensitive to the scope of each project, and composed of: Technology Scans, Cross-Industry Scans, Creative Collisions Scans, Weak Signal Scans.

Well-told stories are critical. They mobilize the imagination in ways that finished prototypes and products cannot. Like low-risk, early-stage prototypes, they are business tools that can be shared, discussed, negotiated and revised. Idea Couture's Scenario Development helps companies shape and articulate the desired and informed futures by telling stories. By writing in the narrative spaces between prediction and imagination, and by conjuring the voices and experiences of consumers, we help tell the tales of new products, services, systems and business models that inspire real innovation. We establish frameworks to explain the complexity of what we learn through new mental models and maps. Understanding and applying complex information is how we bring together rich sets of research data, system dynamics, and design criteria that drive our innovation process.

Being socially responsible as an organization undoubtedly creates valuable goodwill and engagement between an organization and its customers and employees. It is, however, profoundly critical that companies engage in CSR programs that are authentic in intent and closely aligned with company values, purpose, mission, and internal capabilities. Idea Couture's experience in social innovation enables us to guide our clients through the messy and delicate landscape of social good and together develop CSR strategies and programs that create real sustainable impact. We leverage our understanding of consumer behavior and employee engagement to design the best CSR program for our clients, and then work alongside them to bring the program to life, measuring impact and brand engagement all along the way.

We at Idea Couture engrain the principles of sustainable design into every aspect of our innovation practice – from design for reusability to full lifecycle analysis to social enterprise business modeling as examples of some of the sustainability work we've done. Never before has the future of our world and our way of being been so at risk, and customers are increasingly aware of the effects of their consumption patterns on the planet, leading to sustainability concerns that impact purchase decisions and brand engagement. Through the application of our unique innovation model and frameworks for change, Idea Couture works closely with our clients to develop sustainability strategies that enable them to be more thoughtful and efficient in the management of key resources, as well as support the design and development of new products and services that inspire sustainable behavior change. We at Idea Couture believe that sustainability is just good business, and thus engage closely with the organizations that we work with to realize that vision.

We know how to construct and tell compelling stories. Our expertise in brand experience and design, coupled with our customer insight work, means that we know a lot about not only what hooks people into a story, but also how to leverage social media tools to empower people share it. In the context of social innovation, we apply this expertise to how we approach the design and execution of awareness programs, whether for a specific cause or a new social impact program a client may be introducing to market. Our combination of strategic thinking, human insight, and technical prowess as related to social technologies positions us to be particularly creative and effective at driving awareness and designing cause programs that truly engage.