Can do. Will do. Breakthrough!

Many products and services need to be completely redesigned for new markets. This requirement for redesign goes beyond the localization requirement that most of us are familiar with. This need for redesign, or for design innovation based on available technology, reflects the fundamentally different characteristics of emerging markets.

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What is Contextual Innovation?

Contextual Innovation is a systematic multidisciplinary process of inquiry into the new frontiers of user system interactions. It allows you to gain practical knowledge about your target markets to develop entirely novel, more useful and effective products and services.

Users are the best source of new ideas. Our research methodologies, rooted in cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology, help us contextually study the "situated" behaviors, goals, intentions and thoughts of the potential users. Unlike traditional market research, which employs staged focus groups and superficial questionnaires as their main data source, we use tools and methodologies that elicit the deepest responses – thereby laying the building blocks of tomorrow's designs.

Our methodologies are largely organized in four stages:

Research: Our process starts with a deep understanding of users, their characteristics, needs, motivations, overall experience with the world, and their everyday lives.

Analysis: The collected data is then analyzed and interpreted to create meaningful and relevant insights, often in the form of frameworks and models, which become the essence of the innovation.

Synthesis: In order to make the insights most useful and relevant, we embark on a continuous and iterative process of searching for solutions and ideas, which are novel, useful and sustainable.

Implementation: We implement these insights and ideas to create prototypes that can be used for iterative testing throughout your development cycles.

How to Proceed

• Study the culture, lifestyle, and preferences of a specific market or culture in order to determine the type of products, services, messages or strategy that best fits.
• Observe and create a competitive analysis of how your products, services, and brands are being used and perceived by your customers.
• Renew or redefine your product offerings for a new market segment.
• Research the social and cultural trends that affect your business, positioning, brand, products, and services.
• Establish a sustainable partnership with your company to streamline your product development process.
• Define and implement an internal process for innovation.
• Analyze opportunities for existing markets to make the best of a new technology or capability you have developed or acquired.
• Our Proprietary Competitive Analysis helps businesses understand their overall brand experience through real customer interaction.

Industrial design capabilities

The industrial design (ID) capabilities compliment the process of contextual innovation. ID helps transform the design insights from contextual innovations into concrete product ideas. The team at HFI has extensive experience in managing complete product design life cycle projects for industries such as automotive, consumer products, electronics, healthcare and electrical equipment. Our expertise includes:

• Understanding "Product-User-Environment-Task" domain and following a system design approach
• Product safety and ergonomic studies
• Exploration of form based on product function
• Quick prototyping for iterative design process
• Design optimization based on value engineering techniques
• Support detailed technical design
• Product aesthetics and visual communication
• Development of functional prototypes for field studies and testing