What do you do when, with four months left in the year, your sales start slipping behind target? In 2015, BASF (Thai) Ltd., the Thai subsidiary of the German chemical group BASF, faced exactly that. The first half of the year had gone to plan, but July and August fell short. Management needed fresh ideas, and fast. Fortunately, BASF Thailand had invested in creativity a few months earlier.

In May 2015, Thinkergy's founder, Dr. D, and a co-facilitator team of five ran a three-day X-IDEA Playshop for 30 BASF Thailand employees. It's the most playful format of our training. Teams are sent to a faraway country to rescue the flagging food & beverage division of a multinational, only to discover that the locals have some very peculiar tastes and habits. We won't spoil the twist here, but the big reveal never fails to get a roar from the room, and it frees people to take creative risks as they design concepts for the strangest consumers they have ever met. The feedback was so strong that, three months later, BASF knocked on our door again. This time, the case was real: How might BASF Thailand achieve its growth targets for 2015 and 2016? The main focus was on boosting revenue, with a side look at trimming costs to protect margins.

On August 31, 2015, at a management offsite in Pattaya, 16 leaders, including the key management team and the divisional and functional heads, formed two teams of eight for a half-day X-IDEA Mini Innovation Project. With only four and a half hours, there was no time for warm-ups. Focused ideation activities produced roughly 500 raw ideas. Then came Development, where we did something special. To help the teams turn raw ideas into concepts fast, we laid out the idea zones in paper on the windows of the room, in the shape of a house. Its roof read Play Offense: Make More $$$. The left half held BASF-internal ideas: Internal Teamwork across divisions, New Internal Activities, and Better, Leaner, Simpler Processes. The right half held external, market-focused ideas: to Magnify Value through campaigns, promotions and brands; to Multiply Value through new channels, partners, platforms and business models; and to create New Value Offerings. Attached to the side, a big arrow pointed the other way: Play Defense: Save $$$, with zones for Cost Savings and Resource Savings. In the discovery step, delegates walked the room, picked the most intriguing ideas, and moved each one into its zone. In that house, every idea found its room, and the teams could see at a glance which rooms were full and which still stood empty. With that structure in plain sight, the two teams turned their best ideas into 18 Idea Concepts, more than one per participant.

Because most participants already spoke X-IDEA from the Playshop, the teams got to work immediately. Several of the concepts were subsequently implemented to boost growth for the rest of 2015 and into 2016. In other words, the Playshop was the investment, and the dividend arrived three months later.

Is your business falling behind its targets, with little time left to turn things around? Contact us to find out how X-IDEA may help your teams generate hundreds of ideas in hours, focus them on what moves the numbers, and turn them into concepts you can act on right away.