Innovation. Fast.
Opportunities can be a distraction for those teams focussed on delivering. Often requiring unnecessary pressure on key resources. This is why international companies look to us to deliver Innovation Sprints.
Accelerating the R&D Process
For over 15 years, 4c has been the outlet for clients to test new ideas with more freedom to explore. What helps them get the most cost-efficient outcomes are from fast and agile 1-5 day Innovation Sprints. To date, these have provided validation and credibility to new directions. Re-injecting an innovation culture.
These sprints allow you and your team to explore different directions with our ‘fresh eyes’ on the opportunity to provide guidance and ideas. Reducing risk at the front end of innovation so that your team can focus on product development.
“You get this blue sky thinking married with a practical dimension which we liked!”
What is an Innovation Sprint?
Every opportunity has different needs to be realised fully. We tailor your Innovation Sprint with proprietary light-touch research and engagement with stakeholders. Defining the brief and establishing direction (3-5 weeks).
These sprints unleash talent in your team and provide an environment where failure is encouraged. A studio surrounding you in inspiration and focus and a workshop to progress from post-its and sketches to physical prototypes. (1-5 intense days).
To assist with direction, we flesh out your opportunity in a future scoping report. Providing refined visions of the sprint in either sketch or prototype form. Lending our innovation leadership to help you stay ahead (2-4 weeks).
“The best example of merging product design with practical engineering that we’ve seen!”
How effective is an Innovation Sprint?
The conclusion of 4c’s Innovation Sprint, provides a fast turnaround on opportunity exploration to test concepts before too much resource is invested. 4c’s approach to sprints often widens the innovation funnel from the cross-industry experience and network. Typically 5-10 strong direction concepts are generated for review which are then refined to 2-3 directions for further design and development.
Following on from each Innovation Sprint, we work with you to scope the next steps in design and engineering to develop one or more of the concepts further. This can be using 4c’s design and engineering capabilities, or developed by your internal team.
“This is an immediate and efficacious way of getting multi-specialised input on your project, reducing and possibly removing costly back and forth with specialists later on. Making this a highly cost-effective option for large and small teams.”
How clients have used Innovation Sprints
Design cost out
When approached to redesign an existing product and reduce the bill of materials, 4c insisted on rewriting the brief to start with an Innovation Sprint. This led to identifying a new direction that reduced cost of materials by 64% and part count from 85 components to 19.
Improve efficiencies
Using an Innovation Sprint, 4c was able to introduce a system in a laborious storage process. This originally took anywhere from 5 minutes to service each item. It now takes <1 minute.
Explore a market
Providing 5 viable concepts to supply a gap in the market of which 2 provided completely novel IP. This worked by tapping into the clients internal knowledge and cross pollinating with 4c’s prior experience across multiple industries.
Writing the design brief
With clients getting products and services sold to them – often not appropriate to the challenge, they’ve used the Innovation Sprint. These are used to identify and write design briefs for 3rd party suppliers accompanied with prototypes and concept sketches to provide initial direction that are suitable for their needs. Reducing the risk and often removing the need for expensive R&D.
Accelerate the R&D process
An Innovation Sprint can remove the complexity of a need and focus on what is needed. This coupled with 4c’s innovation leadership has led to generational product ranges that increases speed to market.
