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.
I applaud this iniative; hopefully more agencies embrace the need to be as creative internally as they are for their clients.
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.
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.
That is a very well shaped beard
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.
“Unsurprisingly, we were also met with some cynicism.”
if you have trouble parsing the avalanche of agency-speak:
“We started a skunkworks. It went ok.”
And the beard comes to a point much better than the article.
At GE, “problem solving hub” was a euphemism for the departure lounge.
Mumbrella, you really should let a sub work on your contributed copy. This article is barely comprehensible.
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…
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.
“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.