Innovation & Research / Services

Lateral Thinking Approach

LTF supports public and private decision makers willing to explore new approaches with concrete opportunity delivery.

LTF implements innovative methodologies “LateralStorming” to conduct projects and consulting missions, and to address major challenges dealing with human habitat through promoting and adopting approaches such as design thinking, lateral thinking and gamestorming. Those methods nurture concept emergence for ideas generation and validation, through collaborative workshops.

LTF leverages its expertise network to mobilize resources and release energy at the right moment – from the inception or throughout the process. Through the mixing table methodology, LTF provides its clients with best-in-class scope & criteria management system to select optimal solutions, not only for today concerns but also scalability-wise over time. LTF guarantees its clients and partners that its holistic approach, engaged with a lateral thinking vision, will improve their experience and will dramatically increase their projects success rate.

Main Benefits generated by the LTF approach:

-Public and private stakeholders are looking for their own complex reality global understanding
-Provide the ability to focus on all parts to reach overall project benefits
-Improvements accelerated through complementary views sharing
-Favor overall approach upstream of missions to define major project directions, while preserving innovation dynamics
-The mixing table methodology provides stakeholders with a comprehensive understanding of any project criteria
-Access to best experts, able to collaborate within networks for complex projects
-Generating new opportunities
-Ensuring innovation and cross-fertilization
-Access to knowledge and skills broad database

Classical Vs. Lateral Thinking Approach

Classical Approach

Lateral Thinking Factory Approach

Along the first steps of a complex project, decision makers are facing the challenge to validate multiple options, combining their team and selected experts, often in disconnected and independent processes.

Lateral Thinking Factory has defined an inclusive approach to manage initial decision phases, through the respect of all stakeholders involved, in order to maximize effectiveness.

We offer specific criteria and achievement dashboards defined and validated through the process: this is what we call the Mixing Table. This report is defined through several activities, such as multidisciplinary and collaborative workshops; engaging experts aimed at identify consistent solutions, which will be validated throughout the sessions.

Lateral Thinking Factory engages clients towards a successful roadmap. We design exhaustive frameworks to help your teams address all issues and to better express and formalize your needs and vision. Beyond making sure that clients shared and expressed all key topics, Lateral Thinking Factory DNA implies to improve any global outcome, following an ethical approach.

Before anything else, Lateral Thinking Factory supports clients for their projects to become true; therefore, our recommendations will always adopt a pragmatic common sense and will be economically viable in every bit of it.

We elaborated an original methodology called ‘Mixing Table’ with the following objectives
-help clients defining main targets (e.g. positive energy)
-deepen the discussion, and refine specifications by including fields of expertise (e.g. positive energy/using solar energy)
-fine tune each cursor intensity in a coordinated way, to deliver optimized results and recommendations

Main components
– Audit: workshops to draw the overall process, define collaboration objectives and elaborate the initial planning
– Inventory: gather available data about the project, market opportunities and clients objectives
-Kickoff: following data consolidation and analysis, the project structures setting are known and the project can be launched with all stakeholders involved
-Goal Settings – part 1 (crystallization): the first goal settings session aims at formalizing the mixing table structure and components
-Goal Settings – part 2 (validation): including the iteration phase with all stakeholders involved, the second goal settings session aims at validating the mixing table hypothesis, structure and components. This meeting determines the coming steps including the specific workshops selection and planning
-Cross-themes workshops: a series of workshops e.g. positive energy (including several fields such as materials footprint, solar income, etc.); addressing elements validated during the mixing table definition phase. Each workshop includes representatives from both clients and Lateral Thinking Factory, as a guarantee of keeping on track projects within the overall objectives and specifications
-Roadmap mixing table generation: a series of meetings to consolidate outcomes from the cross-themes workshops, in order to build the synthesis, which will serve as a basis to present recommendations
-Lateral Thinking Factory delivers final recommendations and report, which not only are describing current issues but also integrate scalability over time