Inside the Trojan Horse
Last year DDB launched its problem solving hub Shaper claiming it would be something never before seen in Australia. Seven months in Darwin Tomlinson shares some of the lessons so far.
A year ago, a small group of us set out on a mission: to create an innovation lab freed from the pressures of the day to day and in doing so help infuse thinking to support changing the wider agency model. We didn’t know exactly where this aim might take us and we certainly didn’t know it would take us nearly six months just to develop an answer. That answer was Shaper.
Tomlinson
Shaper is a beta business model that aims to harness social creativity and innovation to solve unmet human needs and in turn, deliver social value to the communities in which we operate. It is embedded across the group and accessible to the entire agency.
When we announced our lofty aim in July last year, the industry’s response was positive. Unsurprisingly, we were also met with some cynicism.
Despite months spent exploring, debating and waxing philosophical about everything from the rise of skate culture to the pros and cons of Marxist theory, I am pleased to say that our goal has been brought to life in the past seven months with the development of two prototypes intended for market in 2014.
This journey has provided equal measures of pains and pleasures that I would like to share in the hope they might help others achieve things that matter to this world.
1. Developing an appetite for innovation within the people of an organisation
Let’s face facts – at this stage pretty much everyone is out there demanding innovation in their business. Depending on how you go about it, developing what innovation means for your own business can be incredibly painful but there are some key aspects to our approach that helped us avoid triggering any major gag reflexes.
Primary aspect? The people. To drive the vision and ideology of innovation as a whole it must originate in those that demand it. Those inspired will inadvertently develop what it means and initiate the process.
At the beginning stages, there were only three of us having the conversation and we were very willing to admit that we didn’t have the answers. We were however, fortunate to have our national CEO Chris Brown within the three, setting the remit and acting as part of the team.
This allowed us to get buy-in directly and efficiently whilst also getting on the radar of the rest of agency who began raising hands for involvement. We had already begun to feed the hunger for innovation beyond the client. Chris also taught us that you don’t necessarily need to know exactly how you are going to get there but you do need to know where to steer the ship. Innovation is about exploration and possibility. Everyone involved needs to learn as they go, do it together and be prepared to fail together also.
From this understanding, being able to frame what we were doing, how we were going to do it and most importantly why we were doing it, alleviated what could have been a great deal of debate.
2. Feeding the hunger for innovation through process
I’ve yet to find the utopian agency that can financially support people to sit around and dream about innovation, outside of any client remit. So while the nature of being time was certainly a pain point, we have found a couple of ways to help alleviate that pain.
Do what agencies do best – form teams of people around the project. We had immense expertise at our fingertips and harnessing this effectively was key to the development of a new way of working, one that would allow us to unlock a new process that would fit the bill.
We soon realised that process set us free and much to the agile movement taking over the industry, alternatives to traditional project management were welcomed with democratic thinking at the heart of Shaper.
From great minds in both agile development processes and lean start-up methodologies we also learned a single defining principle: Make lots of little things, quickly. We weren’t afraid to fail and fail fast before moving forward to the next concept.
This allowed for opportunities to assess the direction of each project throughout the early stages of its lifecycle. Although, for our first project, (a wearable tech solution for sport enthusiasts) finalising a process that focused on developing minimal viable products (MVP’s) for prototype testing helped us manage all of our expectations in the short-term, while still progressing toward long-term goals.
We knew the pragmatic benefits of creating prototypes, but the pleasant surprise was the sense of achievement everyone felt when theory became tangible.
3. Expanding the interest through harnessing partnerships
We also found out early on that you can’t do it all. We found our solution in the solutions of others. We don’t claim the credit and the partners we reached out to amidst our vision were integral to ensure we continued to move forward.
Across the two Shaper projects currently in production, these types of third-party partnerships have ranged from sources as diverse as product development and distribution to community and educational leadership, such as Sydney’s digital start-up hub Fishburners, Google’s creative labs and various hardware developers.
As a result, we have seen new waves of partnerships echo throughout our client work, along with the use of new tools and methods for better collaboration on every level.
This alone already provides us with a success we had only momentarily addressed, yet always hoped for, when starting out.
And here we stand seven months in – proud and fervent with two prototypes developed and a dedicated team still inspired by small progress, but hungry to get each to launch.
Stay tuned…
Darwin Tomlinson is a founding member of Shaper and deputy ECD, DDB Group Sydney
I applaud this iniative; hopefully more agencies embrace the need to be as creative internally as they are for their clients.
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Oh I get it. Shaper aims ‘ . . . to harness social creativity and innovation to solve unmet human needs and in turn, deliver social value to the communities in which we operate’.
Pity DDB didn’t solve the problem of how to describe Shaper in plain English. People would then know what Shaper does.
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Shaper is a beta business model (we admit it wont make money) that aims to harness social creativity (wtf?) and innovation (does this word mean anything now?) to solve unmet human needs (sex, check, food, check, shelter, check, 3rd world poverty, hmmm, Tony Abbot?) and in turn, deliver social value (won’t be profitable) to the communities in which we operate (DDB’s clients’ triple bottom line).
Im not being cynical. This is awesome. Keep up the good work.
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That is a very well shaped beard
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So to solve unmet human needs you need to take lots of little things quickly, fail and fail fast before moving forward to the next concept. The FP (first project) should be a WTSSE (wearable tech solution for sport enthusiasts) finalising a process that FOD (focuses on developing) minimal viable products (MVP’s) for (PT’s) prototype testing. This helps you (MAYEITST) manage all of our expectations in the short-term, while (PTLTG) progressing toward long-term goals. We learnt that in going through this creative innovation thingo we were able to write a pretty good brief about ourselves.
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“Unsurprisingly, we were also met with some cynicism.”
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if you have trouble parsing the avalanche of agency-speak:
“We started a skunkworks. It went ok.”
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And the beard comes to a point much better than the article.
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At GE, “problem solving hub” was a euphemism for the departure lounge.
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Mumbrella, you really should let a sub work on your contributed copy. This article is barely comprehensible.
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Interesting to get a bit of an insight into how they are going considering how often stuff like this falls off an agencys radar – or is not even on it in the first place. Just hope they keep going and manage to get the prototypes off the ground…
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Thanks for sharing your learnings Darwin – very timely for my business at the moment as innovation is a major goal for our team this year. It’s a great initiative, best of luck with it.
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“Shaper is a beta business model that aims to harness social creativity and innovation to solve unmet human needs and in turn, deliver social value to the communities in which we operate”
That is utterly brilliant.
You work in advertising. Get over it.
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