Imagine you want to sell milk from an animal whose very name is an insult. In Thailand, calling someone a "buffalo" is a blunt way of calling them stupid. That was the challenge facing Murrah Dairy, a Thai family business that in 2003 started Thailand's first Murrah dairy buffalo farm in Chachoengsao, east of Bangkok. Buffalo milk is a nutritional gem. It is lower in cholesterol and higher in calcium than cow's milk, rich in iron, phosphorus, vitamin A and protein, and free from the risk of cow's milk allergy. But who would pay a premium for milk from a "stupid" animal?

One of the advantages of Dr. D wearing both an entrepreneurial and an academic head is that it allows us to give back to NGOs and smaller businesses by using their innovation cases in master's-level graduate courses in business creativity. We have done so since our very first year. In March 2006, only months after Thinkergy was founded, Khun Charinee Chaiyochlarb, one of Dr. D's MBA students at Mahidol University's College of Management, brought her own challenge to class. Her family's farm was barely three years old, and the young executive was still working out how to turn buffalo milk into a thriving business: How might we position buffalo milk products as a high-value product in Thailand, in spite of the negative image of the buffalo? She led a ten-person team of fellow students through a live X-IDEA Innovation Project, with Dr. D as their guide.

In Xploration, the team used Secondary Research, Situational Reframing, a Knowledge Map and Extreme User Interviews to dig into where the buffalo's bad reputation came from. That is where the case turned. The real challenge was never how to launch buffalo milk products. It was how to change the image of the animal, so that people would get to know the Murrah buffalo, discover that it is anything but stupid, and fall for it. In other words, before Thailand would drink the milk, it first had to fall in love with the buffalo.

With that reframed challenge, the team entered Ideation and used 12 Ideation Tools, among them Happiness and Achievement Islands and Animal Kingdom, to produce nearly 1,200 raw ideas. In Development, Idea Circles helped them shape the most intriguing ones into more than 50 Idea Concepts. In Evaluation, a rough and a fine screening narrowed these down to the five most promising. In Action, the team turned them into a marketing plan with ten usable ideas for an image campaign. The most surprising idea was a choice of audience. Instead of trying to persuade skeptical adults, the campaign would start with kindergarteners and schoolkids, who carry no prejudice against the buffalo, reach them through schools and educational centers, and invite them and their families to the farm to meet the buffaloes in person.

In the years that followed, Khun Charinee, who went on to run and expand the family business, implemented all of the top ideas. Today, families drive out from Bangkok to the Mini Murrah Farm, where children feed the buffaloes, watch them being milked, and make their own pizza and ice cream with buffalo milk. The buffalo, it turns out, was smarter than its reputation.

Do you have a great product that people misjudge before they have even tried it? Contact us to find out how X-IDEA may help you reframe the challenge, change how customers see your product, and design ideas that make them fall in love with it.