The Founders
A serial entrepreneur, Vinay also works with clients around the world to design new ventures. With an operational mindset and a bias for action, he brings a strong focus on financial viability and market feasibility. Before co-founding Wisdom, he was a business design and project lead at the innovation company IDEO. Prior to that, he held senior positions in the media, telecommunications, internet, travel, and venture capital industries. From 2009 to 2013, he co-founded and raised venture funding for WhipCar, the world's first peer-to-peer car rental marketplace. The start up was a pioneer in the exchange of hyperlocal personal assets, offering a first-to-market multi-party insurance product. Vinay earned his MBA from London Business School (LBS) and has a double-degree in Behavioural Science and Finance from the University of Maryland. He regularly contributes to the innovation curriculum at LBS and serves as an advisor to startups globally.
A holistic and flexible creative, Vanina enjoys problem-solving in every context. Vanina's broad marketing experience, from creative to operations leadership, gives her a strong focus on customer need and value proposition. In 2012 she joined an early-stage startup, BlaBlaCar, and helped rapidly scale it through multiple funding rounds. It grew into one of Europe's "unicorn" tech companies, valued at over a billion dollars. As Head of Marketing & Design, she led high performance cross-channel marketing across multiple regions, working at the forefront of digital brand and advertising for disruptive products. Vanina earned a Masters in design from Ecole Superieure des Arts Graphiques, in Paris, after which she worked as an Art Director in advertising and communications for a decade. Her cross-functional experience allows her to approach projects both as a trained designer, and as a marketing strategist with first-hand knowledge of innovation and rapid growth.
The Design Process
The Wisdom approach will bring the design skills you need into your business, instead of taking your project out of it. Our structured creative process allows participants from any business function – including those with no design or entrepreneurial experience – to confidently engage with the challenges of creative work.
About Assets:
In every step we create assets, so that participants can take progress and learnings back to their colleagues, and generate excitement and buy-in.
Customer Research
Research is the heart of our design process. It is conducted in the field, so the project team will travel to wherever target customers are. We interview people in their natural setting, listening to what they say but also observing how they interact with their everyday world to understand how they feel and think. Using a powerful human centered design technique, we source "extreme interviewees": people with unique viewpoints or extraordinary behaviour to trigger market insight and inspire the design process.
Customer Research Assets:
–A synthesis of every interview
–Key overall themes
–A customer journey map
–Initial ideas
Stakeholder Research
Many innovation projects fail because they don't take into account the past experiences and the present realities of a business. In this step, we discover internal beliefs, benchmarks, capabilities and previous learnings, gathering knowledge by interviewing your key management stakeholders, C-suite and providers. Getting a clear understanding of internal expectations, goals and constraints will ensure successful change management and leadership alignment, and bring the project hypothesis into clear focus.
Stakeholder Research Assets:
–A synthesis of every interview
–Key overall themes
–Initial ideas
Ideation
In this step we purposefully practise naive, uncensored thinking, explore divergent directions, and make explicit all our assumptions and intuitions, before doing clarity exercises to synthesise and converge. This design thinking principle of diverging to converge (repeatedly) is core to the creative process, and enables breakthrough outcomes.
Ideation Assets:
–Photographs of post-it exercises
–A longlist of hundreds of ideas
–A shortlist of up-voted ideas
Concepting
Every project will generate several different concepts, typically three, with different levels of risk and reward. Most often the path forwards incorporates elements from all three, but developing distinct concepts will help leadership to align on the company's appetite for disruption, and trigger a leap in clarity and consensus.
The concepts we deliver are all grounded in good financial sense; if we can’t make a business case for something, we won’t suggest it.
Concepts also serve to solicit very early customer feedback. A core innovation practise, showing customers several concepts lets them co-create with us, so we can learn what they really want and need.
Concepting Assets:
The concepts use a mix of hand-drawn and digital illustration, and are supported with a short business case:
–The incremental concept will build on and protect existing market position
–The ambitious concept will need a more significant innovation investment, to expand existing market share
–The radical concept lays out a disruptive vision of the future with a high level of both risk and reward
Prototyping
In the final step we test our ideas and beliefs with rapid experiments. The goal is to take our concepts outside of the safe project environment as quickly as possible. Any means to this end is valid, as long as it is low-cost and fast: we might create a demo-video, an ad or an interface for a product that does not actually exist yet, in order to observe how customers understand and react to them. A core principle of lean methodology, these learning experiments dramatically reduce the cost and time of developing new products, and ensure strong product-market fit.
Prototyping Assets:
–Prototypes in multiple iterations
–Learnings from every iteration
