Over the last 25 years, I have led hundreds of design thinking sessions for international organizations and startups including brands like Red Bull. These sessions allow product designers and senior executives to work together to co-develop ideas which align with larger business strategies and innovation initiatives. These live design thinking sessions are all focused on the same core idea: developing a solution which better serves the needs of the customer.
If you don’t have the ability to organize and run a design thinking session in person just yet, consider ways in which you can run the same session virtually. One of the best ways to do this is to run an online virtual ideation session using the Saturate and Group Tool.
What is Saturate and Group, and what are best practices, tools and online templates for teams and organizations?
When thinking about ways to drive innovation and design thinking within your business, there is no single right way to do it, but the Saturate and Group model is one of the best tools to use to get started with brainstorming good ideas.
Saturate and Group is a brainstorming and ideation process used in the design thinking phase of innovation. It is the part of the process in which a designer and senior stakeholders within the business come together to think about a new product or service by aggregating a wide variety of data points, observations and insights gleaned from stakeholder interviews and other interactions. After aggregating all notes, drawings, data points and insights, the innovation team can work together to develop deeper insights into an opportunity for a new product or service by finding connections between those different elements.
Ultimately, the purpose of the Saturate and Group exercise is the pool together and visualize various bits of data required to make an educated guess about the product or service that would best suit the needs of a particular audience. The key is to put together all available pieces of information together where they can be reviewed side by side. When this happens, insights professionals and business leaders can find more meaningful groupings of the data and make connections that will lead to lasting innovations.
The Saturate and Group Tool
Existing Saturate and Group tools and templates are designed to help business leaders ideate and design ideas which will meet the needs of their customers, but they often lack the ability to collaborate with other team leaders virtually. The Saturate and Group tool I helped create on Praxie, a platform for automating business processes by creating online tools and apps for driving innovation, is one of the best available for collaboration with your team.
You can access the tool freely as a download here. It’s simple to use and is based on best practices I’ve gathered in the 3 decades I’ve spent as a strategic business consultant. Praxie’s digital platform goes far beyond other software tools by including progress dashboards, data integration from existing documents or other SaaS software, elegant intuitive designs, and full access on any desktop or mobile device.
About the Author
Soren Kaplan is the bestselling and award winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an Affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business, a columnist for Inc. Magazine, a globally recognized keynote speaker, and the Founder of Praxie. Business Insider and the Thinkers50 have named him one of the world’s top management thought leaders and consultants.