Reveal what is possible

INNOVATION

Daring. Personal. Transcendent.

Every idea is part of a much bigger story, and every story holds infinite ideas. Lean farther into these stories to enter new worlds of opportunity.

OFFERING: STRATEGIC IDEATION

Need massive ideas? Discover secret worlds buried in insights and your team’s personal experiences. A rich insight can feel heavy. To lighten the load, IX helps you define a solution space, then curates inspiration, and sets boundaries for people to dream freely.

WHAT YOU GET

  • 12-15 refined ideas fully developed into shareable stories

  • Hundreds of idea starters, a trove of inspirational stories, qualitative anecdotes, experiential guardrails, and 3-D kits to stretch existing ideas into limitless possibility.

A LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

  • Two days of hands-on workshops primed by autonomous assignments and small group check-ins. All our best ideas happen in the in-between; not in a conference room or Zoom call. IX sees the workshop as a grower of budding ideas, rather than a planter.

  • Ideas are connections. Great ideas are surprisingly strong connections. What makes a strong connection? Usually, it’s a powerful experience or story. If the idea doesn’t have a story, how will you share it?

OFFERING: DESIGN FUTURES

Traditional trend forecasting does not place brands at the forefront of culture. IX helps teams push past this inertia to create the future of culture by going where change happens–on the margins–and following the lead of real change-makers.

WHAT YOU GET

  • Personal insight into the relationships, hardships, and adaptations at the edges of culture.

  • Speculative worlds formed by imagining how these marginal experiences could shift and grow to create sweeping cultural change in the future.

  • Immersive and interactive rollout to consider opportunities in these future states.

  • 10-year innovation pipeline and/or possible proto-trends waiting to be identified, supported and accelerated.

A LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

  • IX combines its ethnographic heritage with elements of strategic foresight and speculative design.

  • Over 2-3 months, we build relationships, working closely with individuals to understand what life is like for this community, learn motivations and aspirations, identify their adaptations to hardship. Then, we extrapolate future scenarios from these adaptations, bringing opportunity for our partners help support, accelerate, and follow these real change makers into a plausible and preferable future.

  • Finally, we walk back–or backcast–from that future to determine present-day actions that set us up to lead the way forward.