On Wednesday night, twenty five senior people from fifteen of the world’s greatest brands gathered at our lovely Studio space, just down the lane from St Paul’s, at “The DNA of Innovation” a night about how to embed innovation as a business-as-usual way of working.

As our first client event (that wasn’t solely about having a party), none were entirely sure what to expect, but suffice to say, wherever their expectations started, they were superseded by a great night of inspiring presentations and excellent networking with some very worthy peers.

First up was Shed Simove – or Sheridan Simove, to give him his christened name. I’ll leave those of you who see him present, to find out what he legally changed his name to after he became Shed; but suffice to say the headline in The Sun read “God snubbed by bank”.  Anyway


Shed is, as the title of his book says, an ‘ideas man’; and he truly is. The volume of ideas that come out of Shed, minute by minute, are incredible. Some (a lot of them actually) may sound completely crazy. But actually, ideas are not entirely Shed’s raison d’etre. His real talent is actually turning ideas into reality, and it was this that formed the basis of a totally inspirational forty minutes or so, complete with a suitcase full of props.

We were treated to the ‘PG’ version of Shed’s talk, as we were uncertain about how the full routine, complete with the ‘Flying F**k’ would go down with these luminaries of innovation and eCommerce. We probably needn’t have worried because at least three organisations asked if Shed could do the unexpurgated version for them! But better safe than sorry eh?

With such a generic audience, former Big Brother Producer; Shed was almost apologetic that he couldn’t tailor his presentation to any one particular business or challenge, and that consequently he had to talk mostly about his own life, complete with lawyers’ letters, front page tabloid headlines and even his school report from when he was aged thirty (yes 30). All of which will probably tell you that the audience didn’t mind one little bit!

Nothing seems to stand in Shed’s way. An idea had whilst sitting on the toilet will often be in production just days later, and on the shelves in your favourite novelty gift store just weeks later. Sometimes the lawyers letters arrive a month or so after that, but as Shed says “There’s nothing in life that can’t be sorted with a discussion”, and this is of course how his ‘iNotePad’ (a paper notepad in the exact size, weight and shape of an iPad) became the ‘NotPad’.

Although Shed was really there to share some of his techniques for generating ideas, what was most inspiring for most of us was that his ideas to action ratio puts most of us to shame. If only some of us could deliver even a fiftieth of the stuff he does, we’d be some of the most innovative companies in the world.

Next up was the Fluxx team, headed by myself, to introduce the concept of “The Concept Lab”. I will do a more fully fledged blog on the topic very soon, but for now, I’ll sum it up like this:

The Concept Lab is a human-centred research and design facility, and a way of working that is permanently available within any business to help ideas grow and move forward in a highly efficient, yet inspired way.

As Shed would say “Ideas are babies. They need nurturing.” Or as Jony Ive would say “Ideas are fragile”. There you go, two men on the opposite side of lawyers’ letters agreeing violently with each other. Anyway, the point of the Lab being that until an idea is well understood, it is easy to dismiss. The job of the Lab is to breathe life into an existing idea that is poorly understood, or to explore a specific domain in a human-centred way to drive out the best thinking and ideas in that space and bring those to life in a way that moves them forward much more rapidly.

The Lab mentality is to spend a finite amount of incredibly focused time investing in the idea to see if you can make it work; conceptually, technically or from a proposition point of view. Businesses often run ‘Lab-like’ processes, but imagine how much more they would achieve if this was a permanent facility and this incredibly efficient way of working was
business as usual.

To show what you can achieve in a lab and the types of challenges they can take on, up came David Wynne from Red Badger, the authors of Birdsong, and long-time practitioners of lab style projects. He took us through three case studies for big brands where they had worked in a finite timeframe with a tight, multi-disciplined team, and at the end of a small number of weeks put working code into the hands of customers and stakeholders to show them how an idea comes to life.

Finally, we had Simon Evans, one of those super big brain technical architects to talk about how a Lab approach can be used for a more technical focused challenge. Using the same principles and techniques, he showed how you might tackle questions like “Should we migrate our computational processes into the cloud?” in a small amount of time as opposed to the months it normally takes, and not only that, but have hard and fast technical proof that it will be faster or more efficient; therefore allowing a business to move faster to a big technology shift with less risk.

We kept the presentations short and sweet so that there was plenty of time for chat and networking afterwards whilst we tucked into the best that Brindisa, Neal’s Yard and Degustibus have to offer in the way of high class Iberico ham and even higher class cheese and bread. Not only that, but there were clients in the room who have already started running their own concept labs, and were able and happy to share their experiences for those interested in pursuing the thinking further.

Ok, that’s the end of the write-up. Thanks so much as ever to Clemency and the Fluxx team for organising, Shed Simove (Ideas man!) for putting us all to shame, our Fluxx Networkers: David from Red Badger and Simon Evans, and finally to the very prestigious list of people who turned up to participate.

Next Events:

• “Battledexx” – Oct 20th : Open invite, but you must RSVP to embrace@fluxx.uk.com as space is limited
• “Lean UX or Mean UX” – Oct 26th – Request an Invite from embrace@fluxx.uk.com

More on the overall idea of Concept Labs here…