WHAT IS Imaginate?

Imaginate is the Treehouse approach for developing game-changing new futures concepts.

It was developed by a team of innovation experts and has been tried and tested with clients in the Defence industry, in particular with Dstl’s Futures division who are tasked with ensuring the MOD are fit for the future with a 2-40 year time horizon (or whatever time horizon generation-after-next is for that domain e.g. cyber is about 18months and ships is 40years!).

The approach comprises a series of workshops, both virtual and face to face, with work in between. Participants (we call them Imagineers) use carefully curated stimuli to create a future world scenario, identify challenges that this future world could bring about and then generate ideas and concepts to address the challenges.

What does the approach look like?

During Imaginate, Treehouse hand-pick the right Imagineers to work in pairs we call “forced opposites” – where there is enough in common to have a useful conversation, and enough that’s different to stimulate creativity. In a workshop programme including virtual, face to face and asynchronous working, expert Treehouse Futures Facilitators work with the Imagineers and various stimuli to create a written narrative of a future world. These narratives are peer reviewed to stimulate further creative thinking. The Imagineers identify potential challenges that the future worlds may pose which are articulated as How to…? questions. This culminates in the Imagineers answering the How to…? questions by generating ideas to address the challenges. The ideas are then clustered and expanded to form concepts which are visualised by our team of Visioneers. The concepts can then be reviewed by your in-house specialists and enter the feasibility and maturation process.

You tell us how many concepts you want, we calculate how many sprints and Imagineers you need - depending on the inputs you have available, the output could be as high as each pair of Imagineers generating one game-changing concept per sprint.

Forging game-changing generation after next concepts

Is Imaginate right for you?

This hands-on, innovative approach generates high-quality, game-changing concepts that will make a real difference to achieving your organisation’s purpose and impact. The approach is structured (‘structure frees creativity’ as Michael Allosso said!) and metricised – you know how many concepts you’ll end up with.

If Imaginate, that is, outsourcing innovative concept generation as a service, is something you’re interested in, or you would like to find out more about the approach, then why not get in touch via the form below and see how we can help.

If you want to insource future concept generation, Treehouse can train your people on how to innovate or foster an innovative culture through our Innovation Learning and Development services.