Co-Creating A Co-Creation Solution: A Human-Centric Product Innovation Story

In the spring of 2019, we hopped on a flight to visit a new client to talk through some early-stage concept optimization work. Just before the Wi-Fi dropped, we got an email with the simple subject line, “co-creation?”. And so the mile-high scheming began.  

What started out as a rough sketch of different projective techniques to align with various use-cases on the back of a coffee-stained napkin, developed into an opportunity to systematically integrate the consumer voice to drive human-led innovation for a Fortune 500 organization.  

As we sat down in the open-format meeting space, our client quickly shifted topics from the concept test at hand, to the possibility of building something entirely new. She had a challenge for us: with her patient, discerning demeanor, she unassumingly asked, “is there an opportunity to bring the spirit and value of in-person co-creation into an agile environment?”. This particular client previously had access to a resource of highly creative community members to co-create white space opportunities in person; however, due to ever-present dynamic budgeting restrictions, she needed a new way to tap into the human voice to incorporate consumer-led ideation earlier and more often throughout the process.   

There is something almost poetic about co-creating a co-creation solution (well, the closest I’ve come to corporate poetry…). Over the course of the past three years since that meeting, we have worked collaboratively to build a scalable approach to agile co-creation — treating each qualitative engagement as a learning opportunity to hone audience criteria, cater projective techniques, curate discussion guide structures, and optimize deliverables. The result? GutCheck’s Agile Creative Think Tank – or ACTT.   

The Agile Creative Think Tank is a multi-day, iterative collaboration with curated, highly creative participants engaging in daily activities and discussions to co-create ideas and to optimize and amplify existing ideas. Whether informing innovation or communication, or breaking into an entirely new territory, across each application the solution enables our clients to drive a human-centric strategy by leveraging agile co-creation to collaboratively ideate new concepts and amplify existing ideas with their key targets.   

And the best part? It’s fun. This is the type of work that we as Market Research professionals get excited about – diving into true consumer tensions, developing creative ways to indirectly tap into motivations, and ultimately analyzing opportunities to connect brands to people in a deep, multidimensional way through a human-centric lens – something here at GutCheck we have termed Agile Human Experience Intelligence^TM. 

We believe that empathy-driven connection is accelerated by dynamic co-creation amongst key targets. With our agile pillars of speed, cost efficiency, and rigor as the foundation, ACTT is built upon the balance of technology and human expertise, so you can systematically lead with a human-centric strategy.

Go ahead, co-create away.