Innovation Teams

We will partner with you to build breakthrough innovation pipelines that move the needle, build brand equity, increase household penetration, and grow revenues.

How we help

Whitespace Opportunities
Customer Needs Mapping
Breakthrough Innovation
De-risk Innovation Pipeline
Stakeholder Alignment

Who else we help

Innovation is not an innovation until someone buys it

Successful innovators know that innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage. The winners are those that can deliver breakthroughs while juggling the needs of both internal and external stakeholders. They know that it’s not just consumers who need to buy in, but also sales teams, distributors, co-manufacturers, and retailers; all have criteria to meet. This is the brutal reality of innovation.

This buy-in comes when innovators collaborate with people who help them to see things differently and think differently. We call this cognitive diversity. This approach of gathering fresh perspectives is proven to help you understand the constraints of today, the latent needs of tomorrow, and make creative leaps into the future with new propositions. The result is ideas consumers and colleagues alike can get behind.

Even Innovators need to Innovate

Your team will co-create with The Sense Network: creators, outliers, category obsessives, and extreme consumers from around the globe. The Sense Network is proven to predict what innovations will win in a competitive market. Together we will design and develop brand propositions and product prototypes that cut through the noise.

In partnership, we define what innovation success looks like for your organization. Kill ideas that don’t serve your stakeholders. Identify new opportunities through the eyes of your future customers. Build a breakthrough innovation pipeline and execution roadmap. Size and prioritize the commercial prize.

This collaboration will expand the mind of your team and help them reframe old problems in new ways. Discover new possibilities to deliver breakthrough innovation that your organization can align on.

What are your jobs to be done?

Contact us to discuss how The Sense Network can be mobilized to solve your challenge.

How We Work

We use an agile approach when engaging The Sense Network to work on your innovation challenge. By breaking the process down into distinct loops, we keep the cost and timing transparent, build on our successes, and ensure your expectations are met.

Sense Worldwide is not a supplier. We are a strategic partner. We work best when collaborating with your team at each stage. This reduces risk and ensures you can start acting on our output. Together we will learn with every loop, deliver value, and generate breakthrough results.

Below is an example workflow:

1. Mind Expansion	2. Opportunity Mapping	3. Co-create	4. Define	5. Pipeline
Go wide, gather radically diverse perspectives and reframe your category	Go deep and identify emerging and under-met consumer needs	Defining the most fertile opportunity spaces for future growth	Co-create and stress-test propositions with your future consumers	A pipeline of breakthrough propositions to champion your category

The Sense Network is your unfair competitive advantage

Why is The Sense Network better at evaluating breakthrough innovations?

The Sense Network sees the potential in novel ideas. As creators, they are more open-minded and can increase your accuracy, and the odds of betting on the best original innovations, by 65%.

In his book Originals, Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that when you take a managerial role it’s hard to avoid letting an evaluative mindset creep in and cause false negatives.
Managers and focus groups are 55% more prone to major false negatives, undervaluing strong breakthrough ideas. The Sense Network mitigates this risk.

Why is Sense Worldwide better at identifying future innovation opportunities?

We already live in the future, with the people who are creating it, The Sense Network. We go to the edge of culture for inspiration, and drive fringe behaviors and needs into the mainstream.

Science fiction author William Gibson writes about the future. He famously stated that ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’. He observed that there are people in society who are already living in the future, today. These are the people who see things differently and think about things differently. You won’t find them living in the mainstream. They live at the edge of culture. This is why The Sense Network was created.

To gather foresight into business models, brands, customer needs, categories, and products we go to the edge of culture. We collaborate with people at the extremes of the bell curve: outliers, misfits, rebels, and the crazy ones. Meet them, spend time with them, understand their needs and motivations, learn from them, find common ground; and invite them to join our community. 

What they are thinking, feeling, and doing right now is an indicator of where mainstream consumer culture is heading.

How The Sense Network elevates analytical thinking into breakthrough ideas.

The Sense Network sees things differently and thinks differently. Harnessed correctly, The Network's collective, lateral thinking can help reframe a situation analysis, competitive review, or research brief to reveal fresh perspectives not yet visible to the organization.

The fresh perspective of The Sense Network delivers the breakthrough thinking you need.  It elevates beyond the analytical thinking you get from conventional consultancies.

Imagine yourself at the edge of a mountain range. Traditional consultancies can see the summit of the first mountain in front of them. We call this Peak A thinking. To expand our worldview, we must talk to the people who have already ventured within the mountain range. The Sense Network are those who individuals.

They are able to see that Peak A was in fact a false summit. They are in a better vantage point to see the true lie of the mountains. We call this Peak B thinking. They help us to understand the game-changing opportunities and breakthrough ideas waiting for us at the summit of Peak B.  

Through an iterative ideation process of testing hypotheses and receiving feedback, we make creative leaps that deliver breakthrough innovation; it’s proven.

Why is feedback from The Sense Network more valuable than conventional research?

Focus groups and user research restricts feedback to a single demographic or target user. The Sense Network provides multiple, diverse perspectives. The more divergent perspectives your idea receives, the better shape it will take.

The cognitive diversity of The Sense Network can be directed in a focused and calculated way throughout the innovation process. This metric can be expressed as CQ (Cognitive Quotient) and can be applied to both teams, and the tools they use.

To calculate CQ, measure the number of people working on an activity, multiply this by the number of disciplines in the group e.g. strategy, design, marketing, brand, insight, and multiply this again by the hourly duration of the activity.

When an innovation team needs inspiration or feedback on ideas and boost their CQ they can undertake user research or focus groups. When you look at the numbers through the CQ lens focus groups are a disappointing research tool.

How will The Sense Network derisk and future-proof your innovation strategy?

A situation analysis will only ever be 75% complete if you take a conventional consultancy firm approach to strategic planning. With the help of The Sense Network, people who see things differently and think differently, 100% knowledge is our goal.  

The Rumsfeld Matrix is a useful tool to de-risk strategies. At first glance, we know that it can appear confusing. Hopefully this explanation is better than Donald’s.

The Known Knowns
Explicit, documented knowledge about your organization and the sector. Factual, evidence-based quantitative information: financials, trends, metrics, competitive review. A good situational analysis should cover this thoroughly.

The Unknown Knowns
The tacit knowledge known by individuals within your organization, but unknown by the wider organization. Stakeholder interviews are useful for surfacing information. However unless the right question is asked, stakeholders do not always know what they know, this is particularly true of innovation.

The Known Unknowns
The knowledge and opinions of external partners and organizations that we must seek out to make known. Access to sector experts is limited and the echo chamber effect is prevalent. This is where conventional strategic planning begins to slow down, 75% complete.

The Unknown Unknowns
The Sense Network are unconventional thinkers from worlds unlike your own. Their divergent outlook and specialist knowledge reveals unknown unknowns. This perspective helps mitigate the risk of being blindsided by disruption.

Fill in the form and we will be in touch