Imagine you lead one of Thailand's best-known food companies, and your next wave of growth lies with millions of consumers your brands have barely reached so far: lower-income families who count every baht, yet still want nutritious, tasty products they can trust. Winning them takes more than a smaller pack and a lower price. You need to understand their lives, and then rethink your offerings across the board. That was the challenge Nestlé (Thai) Ltd. took on in 2012, and it became our biggest X-IDEA project to date. Interestingly, it almost didn't happen. An early brief would have forced an approach we knew couldn't deliver strong results, so we declined it. Robin Okamura, Executive Director, Communications & Marketing Service, came back to us, and together we set the project up the way it needed to be.

The scale was breathtaking: 11 product categories, each with its own innovation team, working from March to September 2012. After a one-day Xploration Kick-Off Workshop, the teams took their homework into the field. They visited consumers at home, followed them through A Day in the Life, and went on a Safari Hunt, photographing anything that struck them as unique. At a check-in in May, the teams shared their early insights. At the Final Checkpoint in August, each team presented its full set of insights and framed three Final Challenges. Eleven teams times three challenges: 33 innovation projects, all to be cracked in one three-day workshop. Fortunately, most team members already spoke X-IDEA. They were alumni of the X-IDEA Creativity Bootcamps we had run for Nestlé since 2007.

When more than 110 delegates arrived at the main workshop, they walked into a forest of helium balloons in the colors of the X-IDEA stages, with the X-IDEA tool cards hanging from them. Because each team tackled a different challenge each day, we designed a fresh ideation flow for every day, matched to the challenge and never repetitive. The Trophy Wall brought the best Safari photos back as idea triggers, and an Idea Race set all 110-plus delegates racing at once. In Ideation, anything went, and wild ideas were openly encouraged. Then came Development, where the teams turned wild into Wow. With Idea Designer, Pass the Buck to tame the wildest ideas, Get Real and Yin and Yang, they shaped raw ideas into realistic, meaningful concepts. In other words, the wild ideas weren't thrown away. They were the raw ore.

To run 33 projects at once, five core Thinkergy facilitators were on hand throughout, backed by a rotating support crew: 15 team members in all. By the end of day three, the teams had produced more than 14,000 raw ideas and 660 Idea Concepts, and each team pitched its top 15 to a senior management panel. Nestlé then took Evaluation and Action in-house with its own stage-gate process, and more than 75 concepts entered its innovation pipeline. Even so, about 60% of all the tools in the X-IDEA Toolbox came into play across the project. Several of Nestlé's creative agencies joined the workshop and later told us that many of these ideas reached the market. The results also caught the attention of Nestlé's regional organization, which explored adopting X-IDEA as a regional innovation method.

Ultimately, the project proved what Robin Okamura calls the journey "from Wild to WOW." Give people the freedom to go wild first and the tools to get real second, and even 33 challenges in three days don't feel like a marathon. They feel like a festival of ideas.

Do you want to win consumers your brands have overlooked so far, across many categories at once? Contact us to find out how X-IDEA may help your teams understand those consumers' lives, generate thousands of ideas, and turn the wildest of them into concepts ready for your pipeline.