The importance of Trends in a structured Front-End process

Research in the innovation field has shown that organisations running Front End Innovation (FEI) programmes should strive to have a structured and systematic approach to ensure the ideas that are generated are relevant to the business and provide value to a targeted customer segment. Based on best practice research from a wide range of industry sector practitioners, Pure Insight has designed a FEI Competency Development Programme (CDP) to facilitate organisations to reach this goal. The first phase of our Front End Innovation process is based on trends, which runs through a four step methodology (Trend Process) that has a combination of both divergent and convergent activities based on discovered trends.

The first step of the Trend Process is based on trends that have been discovered using key resources, such as Trend Watching and PSFK. Taking these discoveries, teams categorise the trends into Mega Trends (a large social, economic, political, environmental or technical change that is slow to form, but will fundamentally effect everything else) and Trends (an observable change that is moving in a specific direction). From our knowledge of trends and the outputs from a number of trend workshops that we have ran for large international organisations, the following categorisation illustrates a snapshot of key trends and mega trends that are impacting on the current business landscape:

• Mega Trends 
• Global Warming 
• Sub Cultures 
• Access to Information 
• Rising Aspirations 
• Trends 
• Lease Everything 
• Newism 
• Asset Sharing Schemes 
• Second Hand Markets

In order to discover and categorise trends, it is beneficial to create a trend team of 2-4 people who have the responsibility to gather trend insights and movements from a variety of sources on a regular basis. This team can include people from business strategy (identify how the trends fit with the overall corporate strategy and vision of the future), functional heads (who can cascade the information to the wider team), analysts (the ability to identify a number of trends and feed them through the different activities within the trend process) and researchers (who research and maintain a clear and up to date understanding of trends).

Our FEI CDP has been created to enable organisations to implement new FEI tools and techniques, such as the Trend Process with conviction based on a structured and managed approach