Suppose that your brand is already the cup consumers reach for every morning. Where do you grow next? This was the question facing FES (Vietnam) Co., Ltd., the Vietnamese subsidiary of Food Empire Group and a dominant player in Vietnam’s instant coffee market. Expanding into an adjacent beverage category promised a fresh source of growth. But the new category was only worth entering if FES Vietnam could find moments in consumers’ lives that its familiar brands did not yet own. Together with our partner agency Square 44, Thinkergy guided FES Vietnam through an X-IDEA Innovation Project to find them.

The creative work started well before the workshop. During Xploration, an internal Thinkergy team brought close to 20 X-Tools into play over more than a week. With Customer Portraits, we sketched four distinct target-consumer archetypes. Then A Day in the Life followed each of them through a typical workday, and through a very different weekend. Empathy Maps added what each archetype thinks, feels, and needs. The most fruitful X-Tool proved to be the Challenge Sketches. It let us lay beverage need states over the daily consumption journey, revealing opportunity heat maps across the day, a competitive beverage landscape by need state, and finally an Opportunity Journey Map. In other words, instead of looking for a gap on the shelf, we went looking for a gap in the day. More than 100 insights emerged. Plotted on an Insights Map, the aha insights were condensed into eight Meta-Insights, which sharpened the Final Challenge used in the subsequently following IDEA workshop.

On September 15, 2026, two teams of 12 FES Vietnam staff gathered at the company’s Ho Chi Minh City office for a one-day IDEA Innovation Workshop, spread across the main meeting room and several breakout rooms. After a briefing on the Meta-Insights and the Final Challenge gained during Xploration, Thinkergy founder Dr. D guided two teams through the remaining stages of the X-IDEA method: Ideation, Development, Evaluation, and Action. First, the teams rotated through nine ideation stations. At Human Touch, our value-based Human Touch Stimulus Cards were joined by a deck of beverage need-state cards created especially for this project. Think Local rooted ideas in Vietnamese life and culture. The Idea Race sent the teams on a full lap around the office, while colleagues still at their desks looked on with smiles. As always, a few runners tried a shortcut. Waiting at exactly that spot was Dr. D, who sprang out with arms raised high like a Yeti and chased them back onto the track, to the cheers of the other idea runners and laughter across the office. In X-IDEA, there are no shortcuts to great ideas. The highlight was Customer Journey Ideation. The teams walked each archetype’s day and zoomed in on eight consumption moments where a new beverage clearly had a role to play. By lunchtime, this whirlwind of ideation had produced close to 1,400 raw ideas.

In the afternoon, idea quantity turned into quality. During Development, the teams harvested, elaborated, combined, and transmuted promising raw ideas into close to 30 Idea Concepts. One was a ready-to-drink format for the early-afternoon slump. Another played on local ingredients that echo familiar Vietnamese taste favorites. Then the mindset changed again. In Evaluation, the teams used Ideabook to examine every concept: What is strong? What could go wrong? What could make it better? What remains interesting or uncertain? Ideas were not simply judged; they were enhanced before being elected. Each team then selected its three Top Concepts.

In the final Action stage, the teams pitched their six Top Concepts to an evaluator panel: the General Director of FES Vietnam, the founder of Square 44, and Dr. D of Thinkergy, with some strong candidates emerging.

Interestingly, a Thinkergy team had also run the case through all five X-IDEA stages on its own, building a parallel portfolio of 30 Idea Concepts. In a subsequent follow-up meeting, running through a snapshot of its top 10 sparked moments of amazement and lively discussion with FES Vietnam’s General Director. This is how we are now shaping a new service for companies that want to outsource an entire innovation project to Thinkergy; we call it Breakthrough as a Service (BaaS). Together with Square 44, we continue to support FES Vietnam’s management team as it takes the selected concepts toward activation and implementation.

Does your company own a strong core category, but see its next growth opportunity in a space where consumers don’t yet think of you? Contact us to find out how X-IDEA may help you explore your future customers’ days, discover the moments still waiting to be claimed, and turn them into a portfolio of Idea Concepts worth launching.