Research

Researching story and its connection to people and business

The impact of story in business is the connection of people and meaning. It’s about identification and sharing of ideas, the alignment of thinking and creation of beliefs in pursuit of change. Our research practice seeks to answer important questions in the fields of communications and marketing to contribute to the evolution of business.

Solica is committed to helping you understand people, their motivations and behaviors in context with social and cultural preferences as a way of enabling your relationships with employees, customers and stakeholders. Our research practice is called Expericent™,  a design-led ethnographic approach. 

Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. Design ethnography therefore is an ethnographic approach that is qualitatative, people-centric, story based, and opinion-based. We are interested in what others see, feel, and think when they look at the world. We discover by looking through the lenses that our participants use to understand their world. It’s integral to complex communication problem solving.

A common mistake made brands is to ask users what they want from a new product or service. Although this seems like the correct way to do user research, in most cases users don’t know, don’t care or can’t articulate what they need. Design ethnography establishes the underlying problem, identifies the best solution and then validates that the solution works.

Research Collaboration

Creative Skills Training Council (CSTC) Asia Pacific and Australia

With Ralph Kerle, PhD (named one of IBM’s top creative people in the world), Solica co-founded the CSTC, a global academic and business network of over 350 members, to explore creativity in all of it’s dimensions and potential. The Creative Skills Training Council is a leading international collective on creativity from art to design. Membership ranges from academics to leading business thinkers.

Management Innovation Index (MIX)

Solica is also founding partner of the MIX enabling companies to train, track and measure innovation in the workplace. The Management Innovation Index is a unique big data analytic, that models an organization’s creativity, using metrics based on the theories of organizational economics, enabling business leaders and senior managers to make informed decisions around its strategic innovation, the driver of growth and value in an organization. Parterships include Blue Ocean Strategies, Deloitte and IBM.

The Innovation Ecology

The Innovation Ecology is a digital environment that enables organizations to track and evaluate ideas through to product innovation. This tool encourages the creation, collection and categorization of a high volume of thinking and then enables self evaluation and discussion to identify the best ideas and move them through an evaluation and perfecting process.