Living Ideas
Living Ideas methodology, developed by Tom Ajello, is a way to bring ideas to life—and the methodology is itself living and breathing. At Lippincott, during my time there, we used it to bring customer stories to life, to bring commitments to life, and to breathe life into every brand and experience strategy.
It’s become part of how I approach any brand opportunity.
At the heart of Living Ideas is the Experience Disruptor—an experience that we highlight as being disruptive of consumer expectations and/or behaviors in some way. The company itself doesn’t have to be disruptive in a business or innovation sense; rather, it’s a focus on a tiny Experience Factor that could be inspiration to our client in some way. It’s permission to play, to explore, to imagine. To ideate.
This way of thinking has turned me into a collector of Experience Disruptors, of examples of experiences that challenge and recreate expectations, and of best practices that push the envelope of what an experience can be—in any industry.
Customers don’t bring expectations of how an experience works from only direct, traditional competitors—customers bring their expectation from every experience they have.
So whether it’s building out a story and understanding of what out there customers are actually experiencing—building empathy for our customers in a whole new way—or racking up examples of ways we can push our thinking in terms of interaction mechanics, voice, or expectations about experiences as a whole—Living Ideas has become part of how I approach almost any brand opportunity.
The disruptor card has a basic anatomy: the brand responsible for bringing the interesting thing to life, a short description of the interesting thing, a sharp capture of WHY the interesting thing is interesting from an experience perspective, and some photos, videos, and other representation to bring it to life for the conversation at hand.
