What if you wanted to more intimately understand the needs, wants and challenges of your corporate key account clients? Why not accompany them through a Thinkergy X-IDEA Innovation Project to help them work on one of your client’s innovation cases? That’s exactly what BASF East Asia Regional Headquarters Ltd. (Hong Kong) did to get closer to one of its key clients, the Japanese FMCG company LION.

BASF’s Market Focus Team, Care Chemicals Asia Pacific approached us to run a Mini X-IDEA Innovation Project as part of an offsite of LION’s home care division in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. For the project workshop, colleagues from LION’s Home Care Division and BASF’s Care Chemicals were united in four cross-company teams to jointly work on the challenge: “How to make Lion capitalize on emerging detergent trends in Asia?”

Due to the time constraints, Thinkergy chose a selection of X-IDEA tools out of the X-IDEA Toolbox that fitted the focus challenge, gave the delegates a flavor of how X-IDEA works, and allowed the teams to design a few viable detergent concepts by the end of the half-day workshop.

To experience the five stages of X-IDEA, the four pan-organizational teams first mapped out market trends and answered provocative X Questions during Xploration. In the Ideation stage, the teams generated a few hundred raw ideas each by launching Idea Planes, constructing a Morphological Matrix, engaging in wishful thinking with What If questions, and merging their minds in a Pool Brainwriting exercise. Then, each team designed a dozen or so detergent concepts (Development), identified their two top ideas (Evaluation), and finally presented these in a final Idea Market (Action). By the end of the half-day mini-innovation project workshop, BASF’s delegates not only had a better understanding of their LION counterparts’ wants, needs and viewpoints, but also helped to generate eight meaningful top concepts that LION took home to Japan to its innovation department.

Would you like to get closer to your most important B2B clients? Contact us to find out how a joint X-IDEA Innovation Project may help you work hand in hand on your client’s innovation challenge, and experience the structured magic of X-IDEA together.