Front End
Innovation Experts
Real World Innovation Success Stories
We use the neuroscience of creativity to transform the odds of innovation success, exploring the non-obvious to create real world innovation success stories.
Escaping Business as Usual Thinking
If you are drowning in obvious and uninspiring ideas (or doolally, off-strategy ideas) and have an appetite for escaping business as usual thinking, read on...
01
Breaking free from inward-looking obvious ideas
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Innovating disruptively inspired by the outside world
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Innovating at speed & not losing sight of consumers
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Engaging teams for better innovation & ownership
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Building a team’s creativity & innovation mindset
The Challenges
We Help Solve
8Inno Think Tank
Creative exploration of innovation whitespaces to get to strategic innovation territories.
8Inno Sprint
Lean co-creation innovation sprints to get to breakthrough ideas and roadmaps.
8Inno Hothouses
Immersive innovation hothouses to disrupt group thinking and unlock fresh solutions for strategic challenges.
We deploy the right approach for your project using our leading edge toolkits
Results
Here are some examples of the kinds of results we get clients to
Best Ever Concept Testing Results
Working with a global personal care brand we got them to their best ever concept testing results.
£25m CAPEX Investment
Based on our innovation work, a CPG got board-level capex sign-off for investment.
2024 Repositioning
A global US$1bn brand will use an innovation platform we co-created for their 2024 brand repositioning.
Embedding a New Innovation Culture
A bank brought alive their social purpose and embedded a new, more agile, innovation culture.
The brands our team work with on innovation challenges
Global Category Director
Pharmaceutical Company
“I would like to thank you for the phenomenal work the team did on this project. We had so many internal rounds of ideation last year that unfortunately led nowhere. You were able to bring us into a completely different, fresh line of thinking! The result was a good array of tangible, high-potential ideas.”
Innovation Director
Global Beverages Company
“8 Innovation are a great antidote to the innovation sausage machine. Reaching further out for solutions and inspiration is a passion for Coral - she makes it her mission to explore new worlds, creating a learning experience that is stretching, relevant and fun to work together on.”
Innovation Director
Financial Services Company
“When it comes to leading innovation, 8 Innovation is a cut above. From front line colleagues to the C-suite, the feedback from everyone involved was astonishing and the project has left new skills and a real thirst for innovation in the business.”
Global Brand Lead
Global Consumer Health Company
8 Innovation provided us with an innovative platform to envision innovative ideas. With 8 Innovation's strategic leadership, we were able to properly translate business challenges into actionable strategic innovation spaces. As a result, the team was just simply amazed of how many new ideas we were able to magically come up with using their innovative frameworks that stretched our thinking beyond our usual category box. The results speak for themselves! I am just grateful we found 8 Innovation to help us on this journey.
Country Director
CPG Company
The best innovation project I have ever been part of! Extremely inspiring, from immersion in the challenge, to ideation and developing and iterating concepts.
Innovation Director
Global Pharmaceutical Company
The innovation project conducted by Coral and her team was exemplary, setting a new benchmark in my professional experience. Meticulous preparation, full participant engagement, fostered a vibrant atmosphere of creativity and collaboration. Coral's team provided exceptional support throughout the entire process, from initial stimulus to consumer validation, truly embodying the essence of partnership.
Global Brand Director
Global Consumer Health Company
I am impressed by the exceptional end-to-end partnership with strong front-end innovation capabilities demonstrated by 8 Innovation. Their genuine consumer-centric approach, along with impressive speed and agility, consistently delivers transformative results.
The Neuroscience of Creativity
We believe that innovation comes from deploying innovative approaches. We focus on making the latest developments in the neuroscience of creativity practical, so we can use our brains in the best possible ways to spark creative thinking and ultimately get to big ideas.
Number 8 Wire Mentality
We believe in the “number 8 wire mentality” which refers to the ability to solve problems in resourceful, ingenious and practical ways. The phrase originates in the NZ Farming Industry, as does our founder Coral.
Straight Talking
We believe that innovation needs some straight-talking to cut through bland, dogmatic, process-driven approaches or conversely, the “jazz hands”, creativity for it’s own sake approaches that abound.
Authentic Results
We believe in authentic results that deliver on your innovation challenge, whether that’s building a new innovation pipeline, challenging insular thinking or role modelling a new innovation culture with big ideas that land.
A Bit About Coral
I’m on a crusade against innovation sprints that promise the world and deliver nothing. This applies to off-the-shelf formulaic and uninspiring “tick the boxes” ideas or zany whack-a-doodle ideas that are so completely detached from your commercial reality that you’d be ashamed to present to the board!
Hi, I’m Coral, the founder and CEO of 8 Innovation.
As a New Zealander who grew up on a dairy farm, I have a well-developed ‘Number 8 Wire Mentality’* – you could also call it pragmatic creativity - coupled with the experience you’d expect from working with global teams over the last 20 years, based in Shanghai and now in London. That’s 45 companies, across 40 categories in over 30 countries.
I’m passionate about really understanding how our brains work when creating new ideas (the neuroscience of creativity) to help teams be at their creative best to ultimately get to big ideas that land.
At 8 Innovation, I’m joined by a hand-picked team of innovation strategists, insights specialists, problem solvers, co-creators, content creators, copywriters and designers to get to innovation that improves peoples’ quality of life, and within a company, a new appetite and experience of agile innovation that delivers.
Whether the innovation challenge is Health Care, Skin Care or Pet Care (or anything else), we’ll bring fresh thinking to the table, using the neuroscience of creativity to get you to inspiring journeys to authentic results.
Fed up with innovation that does not deliver? Let’s talk.
* At 8 Innovation our approach is inspired by the 'Number 8 wire mentality’ which refers to the ability to solve problems in an ingenious, resourceful and pragmatic way. The phrase originates in the New Zealand farming sector, referring to no. 8 gauge fencing wire which has been used to not only build fences but also solve a myriad of problems. Necessity is the mother of invention!
Get in Touch
Great results happen by design, not by accident!
Let´s talk, even better let´s collaborate. Get in touch and find out how we can get you and your team wired differently for innovation.
How the Neuroscience of Creativity
Makes Us More Effective
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By reimagining the content, pace & stimulus, we elevate mood, enhance creative capacity & germinate ideas before the workshops even begin.
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By mitigating decision-making biases, we give big ideas the space they need to develop until they are strong enough to stand on their own two feet and thrive.
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We supercharge novelty to stimulate dopamine and new neural connections and maximise the cognitive flexibility and creative output of the team.
