Alice Labs

If you want something to accompany your morning coffee ☕ on Thursday morning, then head here ⬇. I am super excited to share the results of this fascinating exploration carried out for Sitra by our team at Alice Labs, Oskar Korkman and Sebastian Schauman. I am also thrilled to share the (virtual) stage with the brilliant Richard Fisher, author of The Long View, a very worthwhile read and "thought-provoking exploration of the importance of long-term thinking".

Sitra and Alice Labs have collaborated to explore the fascinating subject of people's relationship to time and its impact on our willingness to work for a better future (article only in Finnish) https://lnkd.in/d9754aC9

AI and Synthetic Users: What role in the future of insights?   I appreciated the Autonomous Innovation Summit last week, so a big thanks to the Board of Innovation team for bringing together such a fantastic array of speakers to share their experiences and experiments.   The discussion around Synthetic Users (btw. I feel very conflicted about that label) was of particular interest, and for anyone in #consumerinsights or consumer-centric #innovation, it is, without doubt, a phenomenon that will disrupt current working practices.   At Alice Labs, we love working with real people but are incurably #curious and keep our eyes and minds open to change. That’s why we’ve been building on our Leading-Edge methodology and data to create what some would call a Leading-Edge Synthetic User, but we prefer to call a Leading-Edge Entity (aka LEE).   We’ve developed LEE to help us explore how we can use AI Entities to work in different ways and look into hypothetical future consumer behaviours.   This experiment is still at an early stage, and the entity will continue to be refined, but in the meantime, we’d like to introduce you to LEE, who shares below a “personal” take on the future of health and well-being. If you would like to ask LEE a question or know more about our experiment, feel free to reach out in the comments or by DM.

Observer Becomes Changemaker: The Final Pillar of Innovation Reimagined. 👣 On our journey through the Innovation Reimagined series, we've explored how a commitment to resource efficiency can lead to more significant innovation and looked at strategies for creating waves of sustainable impact. Today, we unveil our third and final pillar and delve into the transformative shift from passive observation to active #changemaking in #market #innovation. In our fast-evolving world, the traditional role of market and insight experts could rapidly become obsolete. If we will change how we innovate, we need to substantially change how we think about markets and insights. The activities of analysing and reporting incremental changes and reporting familiar trends, although valuable, are no longer sufficient. They may work well for a slower-moving world where the critical risk is wasting resources on unprofitable activities, but are they fit for purpose in a fast-moving, fragile, at-risk world where not moving fast enough to reinvent the business can be fatal? We argue that the future role of the insight and market experts is to evolve from being (often passive) narrators of the consumer story to becoming active shapers for achieving market change that is in line with a broad organisational vision. This implies: -Having a deeper understanding of the strategic vision and objectives of the company. -Spending much more time exploring new and emerging behaviours that can provide clues about the future of markets. -Mastering multi-method approaches and more profound ways of understanding people and markets (foresights, ethnography, longitudinal data, communities...). -Learning to spot the best 'waves to ride' and clearly understanding the strategic consequences of any new offer very early on, e.g., learning to work with risk evaluation. Moving to this 'new school' of insights will be transformative and require #management support and organisational #change. It won't happen overnight, but without these changes, the insights function risks becoming an anchor rather than a sail, limiting our speed of progress towards innovations that address the needs of the future, not just the present. ‘Innovation Reimagined’ is a collaboration between Sharon Greene and Oskar Korkman, the founders of Alice Labs, and Guy Weston-Smith founder of futurcollective. Image credit: hay s on unsplash