Beyond the Conference Room: 6 Ideas for Your Next Innovation Workshop

Most innovation workshops happen in a room. Ours happen everywhere else.

We call them Insight Immersions: an innovation workshop that takes your team out of the office to learn from passionate experts in other fields, then turns what they see into actionable strategy. The best ideas tend to hide in other people's worlds, in a business that has nothing to do with yours or a craft you've never tried, so that's where we go looking.

Here are six ways to bring that thinking to your next innovation workshop, each taken from a real program.

1. Borrow a problem someone else already solved

Your category isn't the only one wrestling with your question. Somebody else has probably cracked a version of it already, just for a different customer. When Kellogg's brand innovation team set out to understand energy, one of the stops we built into their New York itinerary was a nap pod salon. It's hard to stand in a room full of sleeping pods and not rethink what "energy" means to a tired consumer at 3 p.m.

2. Meet people who perform under pressure

High performance looks very different when the stakes are real and the clock never stops. Grand Central's control room is a good example: a small team calmly keeping hundreds of trains and thousands of commuters moving, with screens full of moving parts and no room for error. It was one of the stops we designed for Interbrand's global officers, alongside an award-winning middle school debate team that could out-argue most boardrooms. Nobody needed a slide on collaboration after that.

3. Go where the culture is happening

Reports tell you what changed. Spending time with the right people shows you why. Ask a CrossFit coach, a master barber and a butcher what being a man means today, and you'll get three very different answers, all of them more honest than a survey. That's how we helped PepsiCo's global leadership team explore modern masculinity, on a program we packed with conversations like these.

4. Make everyone a beginner

Nothing flattens a hierarchy like being bad at something together. The Sharpie brand team was exploring play and escapism, and one of the stops we planned for them was a parkour session. Senior marketers vaulting over obstacles start listening to each other very differently.

5. Visit the future while it's still weird

The best signals usually feel a little odd at first. Penguin Random House's editorial teams wanted to get ahead of the wellness boom, so the programs we designed included an ASMR studio and a breakup bootcamp among many other stops. Some of it felt strange in the moment. That's usually a sign you're early.

6. Don't skip the last hour

Every stop is a puzzle piece. On its own, a piece doesn't tell you much. Put a dozen together and a picture appears. When Coca-Cola's team set out to explore risk and safety, we took them to more than a dozen places, from stepping into a cryotherapy chamber to an EV innovation lab. Then they sat down together to connect the pieces and ask what it all meant for their own work. That last hour is where a great day out becomes a plan.

Try it yourself

1. Pick one real question your team is working on.

2. Find at least three businesses outside your category that live with a version of it, ideally more.

3. Go and see them, then work out the picture. Collect the puzzle pieces and sit down together to decide what they mean for you.

And if you'd like us to design an Insight Immersion around your team's question, we'd love to help. We've run them for Fortune 500 companies like Intuit, PepsiCo and Hershey's.

Related reading: What Is an Insight Immersion?

See more client stories on our Case Studies page.

Plan your Insight Immersion.