In the previous post, we kicked off our series on Ring and its collaborative innovation focus. Now let’s talk about a key element for success: the participants. Just like a party, the guest list can make or break the experience. 

When we discuss with customers who to include on their cross-functional team for a  Design-Led Innovation Workshop or  Design Sprint, it isn’t always who they expect.

In some cases, such as with our  Design Sprint, the process is hyper-accelerated; we’re ideating, testing and creating an entirely new container during the time between breakfast and dinner.

You need participants who play well with others and at the same time welcome constructive friction. Participants must think fast, ask a lot of questions and be willing to abandon ingrained paradigms to explore new ones. They should be highly-engaged and positive, but not overly dominant.

Our workshops require participants to exercise:

• Empathy to see the work through the end-user’s eyes and understand their problems as they experience them.

• Creativity to discover opportunities and generate insights, concepts and solutions.

• Rationality to match a solution to the problem through experimentation, testing and measuring both quantitatively and qualitatively.

We keep these qualities in mind as we help you build your guest list.

When assembling your team, it’s important to create a structure that eliminates hierarchy. All participants should feel comfortable expressing different viewpoints or pushing back on an idea. We make sure everybody knows that what happens in collaboration, stays in collaboration.

From our side, the guest list includes the sales representative, packaging engineer, industrial designer, graphic designer and an expert from research and development. Our team members have helped steer collaborative innovations many times; they trust the process, enjoy the challenge and add tremendous value to the customer team. 

Unlike other bottle manufacturers, we include third-party consumer research experts to speak for the end-user and prevent group-think. We’ll discuss the value of third-party consumer research in the next post. 

If this blog series inspires you to collaborate on new packaging, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us at  ringcontainer.com/contact-us.