Entering an Adjacent Space

Sometimes clients bring us Big Questions, such as:

“What is the future of cash?”
“How can modern societies foster mass employment?”
“If baby boomers can’t (or don’t want to) retire, what happens to our retirement services?”

These are challenges based on how people and companies make meaning. Our search usually sends us looking into adjacencies, places where we can learn before we try to earn.

To inform our strategy, we look for contexts where the question is already being answered. If you want to see cash-less behavior, look at Japan’s use of mobile payment. If you want to see how cash is used in a culture that thrives on credit transactions, look to Finland. If you want to study the culture of barter, meet superusers of swapping sites like favorpals or swap.com.

To zero in on opportunities, we engage with potential target customers, users, and partners through ethnography, empathic research, co-creation activities — you name it, we do it.

Next, we align against a north star vision illustrating where our client wants to go and we figure out the best first step to getting there. We help our client take that first step into the market and start building organizational knowledge: how customers are willing to spend their time and money, how the organization can reach the customers where they are, and how to move to a scalable operating model. It’s how to get your feet wet. And it’s a lot of fun.  To move through this process, we’ll use our tried and true tools & frameworks to guide us: