10
Multiverse Excursion
REACHING THROUGH THE REALMS
So there it is. The eight realms of the Multiverse in all their glory, defined, diagrammed, and copiously explained, with sets of guiding principles that we trust already have you thinking about what it means for your business. The next step is to operationalize what you have learned—to step out into the unknown to explore what possibilities, amid the infinite directions in which you could go, would create the most economic value for your business.
On any journey of exploration into the unknown, it is a given that we cannot know ahead of time what we will discover. But if we can in advance determine at least the nature of what we seek, we can heighten our intuition, tune in our mental receptors, and focus our eyes on the form a discovery may take. When we then move into cosmos incogniti, we will be better equipped to see the possibilities that lie before us. The Multiverse should thus provide you with a new lens, a focused way of seeing and making sense of what you discover on your expedition into the unknown.
Exploring the Multiverse
To ensure that your new lens is polished and focused properly, let us here give the very essence of the realms we fully examined in Chapters 2 through 9, respectively:
∞ Reality: Staging the richest of experiences, Reality fully engages the five senses, enraptures the whole body, captivates the mind, involves the physical world, and bonds you with your fellow members of humanity.
∞ Augmented Reality: Enhancing the world around us, Augmented Reality uses bits to augment our experience of Reality, overlaying it with digital information constructed to enhance, extend, edit, or amend the way we experience the real world.
∞ Alternate Reality: Creating an alternate view of the real world, Alternate Reality uses Reality as a digital playground via a superimposed, virtual narrative freed from the bonds of actual time.
∞ Warped Reality: Playing with time, Warped Reality takes an experience firmly grounded in Reality and shifts it from actual to autonomous time, playing with time in any way possible.
∞ Virtuality: Crafting the most imaginative of experiences, Virtuality immerses the mind, although generally not the body, in ways that free us from the constraints of Time, Space, and Matter.
∞ Augmented Virtuality: Bringing the material into the virtual, Augmented Virtuality takes a Virtuality experience and uses some material substance to alter, enhance, control, or amend how we experience the virtual world.
∞ Physical Virtuality: Instantiating the virtual in the material, Physical Virtuality takes an experience happening in a virtual place and then instantiates, or realizes, it in the real world; first you dream it, and then you build it.
∞ Mirrored Virtuality: Absorbing the real world into the virtual, Mirrored Virtuality creates a virtual expression of Reality that unfolds as it actually happens, providing a particular bird’s-eye view.
So read and reread these—or the version graphically portrayed in Figure 10.1—until you intuitively understand each one. Also refer back to Figure 1.5 in Chapter 1, “Cosmos Incogniti,” as necessary until you instinctively know where every realm lies in the framework.
Realize, however, that as you shift now from understanding to ideation, in the end it’s not important how you classify any experience you might stage; the only thing that matters is the efficacy of the offering. Does it create value for your customers and economic value for your company? So, yes, become good at classifying as an aid to understanding, but once you have an idea, shift your thoughts from where it came from to where you can take it in creating a new offering.
Figure 10.1 The essences of the Realms
In particular here, think not just of new goods and services, but innovative experiences and transformations. These higher-level offerings in the Progression of Economic Value (shown in Figure I.1 back in the Introduction, “Innovation on the Digital Frontier”) create greater value for customers, generally have longer life spans, and make it possible for companies to capture more economic value than the lower-level offerings. So focus your company’s innovation on engaging customer experiences and even life-changing transformations in order to create the greatest possible value for each of your individual customers, and therefore the greatest economic value for your company.
Remember, too, that these eight realms of the Multiverse form just one way of looking at our core framework. We referred you back to Figure 1.5 in particular because it shows the framework’s full sense-making architecture with its 8-6-3-1 formula: eight realms defined by six variables that comprise three dimensions making up the one Multiverse. Now in Part III, “Guiding,” we not only want to cement your understanding of the eight realms (as defined by the three Event, Place, and Substance dimensions) and help you apply them to your business, we also want you to better understand how the one Multiverse incorporates the six variables of actual and autonomous events, real and virtual places, and material and digital substances, and then how to apply them to your business independently of the realms.
These realm and variable perspectives, applied with diligence, serve to reveal opportunities hidden from plain sight. Our goal here is to help you make your exploration for and capture of new value proactive, to eliminate having to constantly react to your competitors’ discoveries, and effective, making an otherwise overwhelming task manageable, thorough, and fruitful. But given the vastness of cosmos incogniti, with their endless galaxies of opportunity amid infinite possibility, wherever do you begin?
We recommend you conduct two distinct ideation expeditions into the digital frontier. Each of these spur the generation of ideas through a different method, starting from the differing vantage points of first the realms and then the variables, with their own perspectives, approaches, sets of activities, and results. In the remainder of this chapter we will show you how to Reach through the Realms with the Multiverse serving as your sense-making guide. This focuses you on methodically exploring each and every one of its eight realms to discover the value creation possibilities they hold in turn. In Chapter 11, “Offering Depiction,” we then show you a way of plotting experiences that lets you Vary the Variables of the Multiverse. This ignores the realms and instead focuses you on the six variables that define the framework.
These two expeditions yield ideas at the intersection of technology innovation and customer need. You can therefore boost the effectiveness of your Reaching through the Realms and Varying the Variables expeditions by better knowing your customers and the technologies that affect your industry. So we also recommend that you continually look to your customers to observe their behavior and thereby uncover underserved or unmet needs. And remember, as Carver Mead famously said, “Listen to the technology; find out what it is telling you.”1 Through looking at your customer, listening to the technology, and understanding the Multiverse, you are well equipped to begin your first exploration into the digital frontier.
A Structured Walk through the Realms
Columbus, Magellan, Lewis and Clark, Amundsen. Such explorers of terrae incognitae in times past all had their maps, however incomplete, to guide them on their journeys. During their expeditions, each imagined the new possibilities their discoveries offered and pursued them vigorously. Sometimes they found what they imagined they would; sometimes they were surprised by what they discovered. With the guiding frameworks of their times, they explored our real world. Now, with the Multiverse as a guide, you can embark on your own exploration of cosmos incogniti, not with a map of earthly territories but one of logical territories, more like how mathematicians or physicists use hypotheses to steer their explorations.
Reaching through the Realms systematically explores all eight realms of the Multiverse, incrementally stepping from one to the next, to see what possibilities arise from visiting each and every realm, including looping back to the realm from which you started. Such a comprehensive excursion provides you with new inspirations, ideas, insights, and knowledge gathered along the way.
As you Reach through the Realms you will find yourself in cosmos both cogniti and incogniti. Some will be familiar and perhaps even mundane, whereas other will be bursting with possibility. But also, just as with the incomplete maps for the explorers of old, do not be surprised if at times you fall into a dark void that conveys no illumination to your circumstances, leaving you with no discernible new value creation ideas for your customers. When this happens, just move in another direction and chart a new course. Who knows? Maybe that trajectory will take you back around and position you to explore that same realm from a different vantage point, or simply lead you to richer opportunities elsewhere.
As is also the case with Varying the Variables, the Reaching through the Realm expedition calls for a team of diverse and knowledgeable employees gathered together to jointly explore the possibilities. Select participants who, collectively, cover the full range of business responsibilities in order to discover value creation possibilities and business opportunities from across the full scope of the business. (And be sure to include those charged with looking at the customer as well as those responsible for listening to the technology.) Once the group gathers, kick off the expedition with immersion—a learning and understanding session, whether for the first time or as a refresher, to get everyone in Multiverse-thinking mode. Go through the Multiverse, as a whole and realm by realm, with plenty of examples—especially ones they can experience themselves, live!—until everyone has the base knowledge necessary to apply the realms to your business. Ideation then begins with the participants dividing into small teams working independently to conduct a structured exploration of the Multiverse realms. After generating ideas at each stage, the teams bring their ideas together for explication, discussion, refinement, and further idea generation. Selection then follows with the group choosing those ideas with the greatest value-creating potential to pursue further toward opportunity realization.
We will focus here on the ideation portion of this expedition. To determine where to start ideating, think about a current offering, one you would like to enhance by pushing it out toward the digital frontier. While you might have a very strategic reason for your choice, offerings chosen for other reasons—underperformance, new competition, a sneaking suspicion there’s something more of value somewhere, or even at random—can all prompt effective sessions as well. You may also wish to start with just the germ of an idea for a new-to-the-world offering and use the Reaching method to further explore its potential and possibly identify even greater opportunities to create new value. When searching for new ideas beyond your existing offerings, you might even choose another company’s offering, possibly a competitor, or even one from another industry that you think might soon impact yours. You never know what ideas generated and insights gained will find their way back into your company’s offerings.
Once you choose the experiential offering targeted for innovation, identify its place in the Multiverse, the realm most closely associated with its core value proposition. This realm serves as the offering’s anchor realm—the starting point for a structured walk through the realms. For example, if a National Football League team charters a Multiverse excursion to innovate its in-stadium offering, Reality anchors the offering. The journey then steps from this realm to proceed through adjacent and then more far-reaching realms to discover what innovations might enhance the in-stadium experience, with a goal of ensuring fans fill the seats at every game. No wonder that in 2009 the Dallas Cowboys brought Virtuality into the field of play when it debuted the world’s largest video screen over its field (although not quite “over” enough to avoid being hit by a punt in the first game played there). Guests at the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey (opened in 2010) similarly benefit from Augmented Reality in accessing in-stadium smartphone apps for instant replay, live statistics, and even video feeds from other games, with Virtuality-based fantasy playing against other in-stadium patrons forthcoming.2
Suppose you are a medical products company with a live-body-function-imaging offering similar to Luminetx VeinViewer, mentioned in Chapter 3, “Augmented Reality.” After centering your offering in this realm, you then start to look right next door in, say, Mirrored Virtuality to reflect remotely in a virtual world what happens to bodies as they function in the real world. If, on the other hand, you offer an interactive virtual world firmly anchored in Virtuality, such as a video game or Web-based retailer, then your Reaching through the Realms expedition heads from there back toward Reality. You may find value in embracing a physical controller to take advantage of Augmented Virtuality, tying the experience into real time with Mirrored Virtuality, or venturing out into the real world via Alternate Reality.
Whatever you wish to explore, the whole offering or some distinctive aspect of it fits in one of the eight realms. That defines the most familiar territory and therefore the logical starting point, or anchor, for your Reaching through the Realms expedition. The structured walk then follows a path from this home base through these four stages, also represented in Figure 10.2:
∞ Stage One: Here you explore the three immediately adjacent realms, each one variable different from the anchor, to see what opportunities lie right next door.
∞ Stage Two: This takes you further away, examining the three realms that vary from the anchor by not one but two variables, leaving only one unchanged. This takes the original notion of the offering into strange new territory, making explorations more difficult, but potentially more rewarding.
Figure 10.2 Expedition guide to Reaching through the Realms
∞ Stage Three: In the next stage you vary all three variables defining the anchor realm at once, essentially letting go of the anchor and starting anew. This realm, the polar opposite from the starting realm, retains the most degrees of freedom from the offering being innovated, allowing for the most far-out ideation.
∞ Stage Four: The final stage returns the Multiverse excursion to the beginning, back to the anchor, where you may very well see the offering innovation possibilities in a new light, reflecting the discoveries made throughout the prior stages of the expedition.
In any full exploration through the first three stages of Reaching through the Realms, this fourth and final stage should have you thinking anew about your offerings. For as T. S. Eliot wrote in “Little Gidding,”
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.3
An Electronics Retailer Reaches through the Realms
Now that we have introduced you to the Reaching through the Realms expedition, let’s see what one particular company, say, a big electronics retailer, might get out of such an expedition. Although all such retailers have virtual presences at their websites (providing an alternative starting point), we’ll focus here on the store itself, anchored as it is in the realm of Reality. Because we don’t want to overwhelm you with all the details of just one theoretical example, here we’ll provide just enough for you to get a feel for a real-life Reaching ideation expedition.
Stage One: How might we employ Augmented Reality, Warped
Reality, and Physical Virtuality, each adjacent to our current
store’s anchor in Reality?
In this first stage, you and your team go beyond the actual events, material substances, and real places of Reality by reaching into the realms immediately adjacent to it, as shown in Figure 10.3. Augmented Reality, Physical Virtuality, and Warped Realty all differ from Reality by a single variable, each of which you explore one at a time to seek new value-creation possibilities.
The key to Augmented Reality is using digital technology (moving here from Matter to No-Matter) to enhance a customer’s experience of the physical store. So let’s develop an iPhone app (Good thing we sell them! But we’ll port it to other smartphones, too …) that becomes the customer’s window into our inventory and, more importantly, the guide for his own experience.4 As the customer walks around, everywhere he points the camera on his app-equipped phone he sees an overlay of information (much of it already on our website) about whatever he’s looking at. There are directional arrows to every type of product we have, which he can winnow down to his desired set. Pointing to any one product—whether display merchandise, a box, UPC code, or any other identifier—brings up richer product information and demonstrations, which we’ll customize to his needs. He can fully explore everything about that product, compare it to alternatives, experience it in action, find and call over a sales associate, and even buy it, with the item waiting for him at checkout or shipped home ….
Figure 10.3 Reaching through the Realms—starting from Reality
With Warped Reality, we start back at the vantage point of our store and shift from Time to No-Time. We’re still operating in a physical place of Space and Matter, but now we get to explore how to play with our customers’ sense of time. What about taking the customer through a time warp surrounding the (still short) history of home electronics? Here’s an idea: Let’s do an Electronic Age Assessment experience! Let’s determine where you, Mr. Customer, lie on the continuum from the 1950s (the Dawn of Time Age, meaning no experience whatsoever with home electronics) through the 1970s (the Stereo Age, where you know your audio equipment backward and forward, including amplifiers, sub-woofers, and the like, but computers remain a new-fangled thing) to the 1990s (the Personal Computer Age, where even they are old hat) to today’s world of proliferating devices (call it the Connected Age, with its smartphones, flash drives, netbooks, and tablets, not to mention its Facebooks, Google Earths, and tweets). This could be a standalone experience, or more likely a something a sales associate would do in concert with the customer whenever he determines that someone is looking for a complete overhaul of his electronics environment. The Electronic Age Assessment will then help the associate customize the interactions as he steers the customer to the best, say, home theater system for his situation. And in a further play on time, when they together define that system, we could physically morph our home theater room to represent his own future home, so he sees what it will be like when it’s all installed next week ….
Now shifting from Space to No-Space, we come to Physical Virtuality, where the goal is to take something that exists solely in the customer’s imagination (even if we’re the ones who put it there!) and make it real. So let’s take our cue here from The Matrix and have customers enter our “Electronics Construct”—our virtual store (within the physical one) that starts out completely blank, but morphs to the customer’s every whim as we help him select the right home computer, the right home theater, the right gaming station. We’re tracking and holding inventory with every selection, so by the time the experience is through, we can physically present that system to the customer. For those that bring in a picture of their home environment, we even digitally morph it to what it will look like once it’s all installed and print it out right there and then. What a close!
And let’s further realize we have way too much physical inventory that really should be virtual. Just look at all those racks of CDs. They haven’t gone away, not just yet, but the need for the inventory sure has. We already let our music aficionados move from Space to No-Space when they put on headphones to listen to any album we have for sale. Let’s stop having albums for sale until a customer says this is the exact album he is looking for, and then and only then, stamp it out on an actual CD, print out the material for the jewel case, and put it all together complete with personalized (albeit automated) artist signature, if the customer will pay for that extra. Let’s then use the same process for DVDs, so that we become the physical counterparts to iTunes and Netflix for as long as customers still buy such physical technologies.
Stage Two: What possibilities await us in the farther reaches of
Alternate Reality, Mirrored Virtuality, and Augmented Virtuality?
Let’s see: Alternate Reality [No-Time – Space – No-Matter] is about using the real world as a virtual playground, such as for helping customers connect to each other to figure out a mystery. You know, though, there is no reason we couldn’t apply this to our sales associates—and thereby make it fun for them and the customers alike. What if we charge each sales associate with determining the customer’s “Electronics Identity”? They should see each customer as a puzzle to be solved or mystery to be revealed, with the setting being the store (in fact, every separate store this customer steps foot in). With each associate cast as a persistent, Columbo-like sleuth garnering salient clues through perceptive observations, insightful questions, and telling experiences and collaborating with their colleagues in the other stores. We create a smartphone app (another opportunity to show off our stuff) that leads them through their investigative choices, the completion of each adding one more puzzle piece to our view of this individual customer, until we have a full representation of the identity of each. A prize for solving the mystery sweetens the deal, for knowing each customer increases the opportunity to meet his needs for the next piece of electronics that in turn represents a puzzle piece for his ideal system.
With Mirrored Virtuality [Time – No-Space – No-Matter], we must turn around and create a virtual space as the backdrop for giving customers better understanding of what’s going on in the real world with, say, their own sound system, home theater, gaming system, or computer setup. So let’s switch roles from store sleuth to playing doctor by offering (for a fee, of course) a system checkup, an ongoing health assessment, and even a “stress test” to customers. First, our customer service personnel could inventory every piece of electronics in the customer’s home—healthy ones, aging ones, and those in disrepair. (Hmm … this would be a great add-on whenever we’re already setting up or fixing a system!) The customer could even do it himself via another smartphone app we provide (point, click, capture!).
That provides the checkup. For the ongoing assessment, we create a virtual representation of the setup, linked via the Internet to each addressable piece of equipment to keep track of everything that happens. (We could even work with the manufacturers to make every reasonable item we sell Internet-addressable.) Customers can go at any time, from anywhere, and view this virtual representation, seeing what has happened over time and what is happening right now. A dashboard lets them know instantly anything that goes wrong (Let’s get that in urgent care!), see how components degrade over time (Is it time for replacement?), learn of any anomalies (Is there a patch to fix that?), and track all repairs, changes, and modifications. The stress test looks at possible future scenarios and sees if the system comes through with flying colors or needs some upgrades. Through it all, the customer comes to understand his system, its capabilities, and his own usage, customs, and habits in a way never before possible.
That brings us to Augmented Virtuality [No-Time, No-Space, Matter], where we want to enhance customers’ virtual experiences by involving the whole body. We could … But wait, we’re looking at this from the perspective of our physical store; there’s no virtuality to augment! So what if we … No, that isn’t Augmented Virtuality. How about … Hmm, that doesn’t work either. Maybe we’re in one of those dark voids mentioned earlier where we just can’t seem to generate an idea that makes sense. (And if we could, believe us, we would put it in here!) We’ll have to try a different route, come at this realm from a different point of view. Where have we already generated ideas with elements of Virtuality that we could augment? Well, there was that Electronics Construct to guide customers in determining the right system. Then there was the virtual representation of their installed systems we just came up with in thinking about Mirrored Virtuality. Can we now augment them with physicality to get customers bodily involved with the experiences?
Still nothing. Short of outfitting customers with haptic body suits—technology not yet ready for prime commerce time—and the trivial example of having their iPhones shake, rattle, and buzz to warn of something they should pay attention to in their mirrored representation, we still have no good ideas here. Let’s not worry about it, and move on.
Stage Three: What ideas can we generate by considering the
exact opposite realm—in this case Virtuality?
Pure Virtuality [No-Time – No-Space – No-Matter] always presents many possibilities, with the obvious one being an entirely virtual store. We’re not talking about a whipped up website, although that would count as Virtuality, but a truly virtual place—one where customers, or rather their avatars, could walk, fly, or teleport around seeking out the best buys in electronics. Yes, that sort of thing was tried in the heyday of Second Life (all of four or five years ago), but the problem with those attempts was that they were glorified ghost towns, with no staff, no service, and no sales (and often customers with no shirts). They weren’t experiences. Our virtual store, on the other hand, will be filled with them, from product demonstrations (watch a live football game on the virtual HDTVs—select any one or take over the video wall!) to special events (dive into a heavy metal concert’s virtual mosh pit if that’s your thing—avatars don’t bruise!) to gaming quests (hunt down and shoot the flying bargain—sure beats the blue light special!). And our virtual store will be filled with our own associates, or rather their avatars, who will guide the experiences of our guests. (No ghost town this!)
Once we get going here, the cosmos is the limit. All we have to do is keep in mind that we’re designing experiences, not a static store; engaging customers, not targeting them; getting them to visit and explore, not selling them merchandise and then booting them out the door. And there’s no reason to limit such virtual experiences to customer’s own homes. Each one can be accessed from our own physical places, providing yet another opportunity to show off our electronics.
Did you notice something about the virtual product demonstration idea above? It was a real football game the avatars were watching, so the tie-in to real time actually places it firmly in the Mirrored Virtuality realm. So what! It doesn’t matter what realm an experience ends up residing in; what’s important are the ideas sparked by whatever realm we’re exploring at the time. The idea’s the thing, not slavish devotion to any constraints of the imagination. We’re thinking outside the universe here, for goodness sake, so let’s not put ourselves in any box. And while we’re at it, let’s also save judgment on these ideas for a later time when we can refine them, see how we might integrate them, and select the best ones for further investigation and hopefully implementation. (After all, if you don’t put them into operation, they’re not innovations at all but remain mere ideas.)
Actually, let’s do explore a small amount of integration—a little mixing of the ideas through some melding of the realms—here and now. Now that we have associates representing themselves through avatars, why can’t they do so in the physical stores? Recall that (Augmented Reality) iPhone app that guides a customer’s experience in the store; we’ll let them avoid waiting for a live sales associate and call up one immediately—not “call up” in the sense of making a phone call, but in the sense of conjuring a spirit from the great beyond of Virtuality. These virtual associates could be anywhere, support everywhere, and sell everything.
Let’s harken back to the (Warped Reality) Electronic Age Assessment too. Although thought of while exploring the real world of Space and Matter (and the unreal world of No-Time), consider how much more engaging this experience could be if it were virtual, where we could instantaneously fly through visual representations of each Age, rather than mere mock-ups. Same goes for morphing our system to match the customers’ future system. Such time traveling would be so much more efficient, so much more engaging, so much more effective if experienced virtually rather than physically. And remember the Electronics Identity mystery scenario generated in thinking about Alternate Reality? That, too, would benefit from the influence of Virtuality thinking, especially by having our virtual sales associates join in observing, questioning, and interacting with customers. Finally, let’s look back at the big fat zero we came up with in thinking about Augmented Virtuality. Now that we’ve thought about what a virtual store really should be, we do have some virtual experiences that could benefit from a little physical augmentation. Zapping the flying bargain with a Wii Remote would be more engaging. Even better, let’s create and control the Electronics Construct with Microsoft’s Kinect. That would not only make for a great, active, cool experience, but it would help us sell more Xboxes as well!
Stage Four: Go back to the beginning and think anew, with the enlightenment and insights gathered so far, from your anchor realm’s point-of-view. How might you pull it all together? And what have you discovered?
Speaking of starts, we began with the vantage point of today’s physical store and ventured into a retail cosmos that is now at least a little more cognitus than incognitus. One aspect of integration that now seems clear is the need to interact with customers wherever, whenever, and however they would like. We’re not limited to the confines of the store, to normal retail hours, to physical interactions, nor to Reality itself. All the ideas we’ve talked about can come together anywhere, anytime, and anyway a customer wants, whenever that individual customer finds himself in the market for a piece of electronics. If we’re really good, we can even spark the creation of that market within customers through in-store, at-home, and out-of-this-world experiences that cause them to want to spend time with us, in engaging spaces we have created, around interests that matter to them.
And there’s one key discovery we’ve made, a thread that’s been weaving through these ideas: we don’t today use our own products enough to sell our own merchandise! How can we expect our offerings to be indispensable in the lives of our customers when they so obviously remain dispensable in our work? Using what we sell to create the greatest engagement for our customers will then yield the greatest economic value for our business.
And so at the end of all our exploration, we have arrived where we started and indeed know the place for the first time.
Moving Your Offering’s Anchor
To begin this sample expedition we determined that Reality was the most appropriate anchor realm. But just because your current offering anchors in a particular realm does not mean it must stay there. Anchors hold a ship in place, but you can also raise them from the sea floor in order to move to a new location. During an ideation expedition, consider the possibility that the features of an offering that have anchored it to one realm be discarded and replaced by the features of another realm. You may very well find that you have discovered a way of creating a better value proposition for your customer by arriving at a whole new means of creating and delivering the offering.
USAA serves as an example of this type of realm migration. This financial company recently switched realms in how it deposits a soldier’s paycheck. Rather than leaving this offering a Reality-based experience with the physical placement of the check in a teller’s hands, USAA discovered greater value for their customers in virtualizing the offering through digitizing the physical check. Now soldiers, many of whom are on long overseas deployments, simply photograph their check with their iPhones and send the photo to USAA for prompt depositing in their bank account.5
This immediate digitization of the check changed the essence of the offering from Reality to Virtuality, the polar opposite realm. The physical check was no longer “material” to the experience, nor the soldier’s location in space, and actual time essentially became a nonfactor. The paper check, once digitized via the iPhone, frees the offering from the bounds of material substance, real place, and actual events. If USAA were to conduct a Reaching through the Realms ideation expedition for this new check-deposit offering, it could therefore start in Virtuality.
But some offerings are, due to their very definition, unlikely to change realms. For example, an automaker provides a personal auto driving and riding experience, which, by definition, is bound to Reality. But as more and more capabilities come on board that augment the driver’s experience (remember that Wired piece that increasingly seems to be a work of prediction rather than parody?), we can see the potential for the default experience to be one filled with so much digital technology that Augmented Reality becomes the anchor realm. Similarly, the experience of going to meetings has in many cases shifted from Reality to Mirrored Virtuality with offerings like GoToMeeting, whose only essential tie to Reality is actual time. It doesn’t require a special place, just such digital substances as the participants’ voices, texting, images, and PowerPoint slides. In the case of a GoToMeeting Reaching expedition, the starting realm would be Mirrored Virtuality, not the Reality of the physical meetings it displaces.
One intriguing possibility for Virtuality-based businesses, especially those with avatar-based virtual worlds: make a complete flip from Virtuality to Reality by conducting a Reaching through the Realms expedition from the perspective of the avatar. A virtual world is a virtual world, after all, forming all of the avatar’s Reality. Therefore, the avatar can experience the entire (virtually simulated) Multiverse within the virtual world (once removed, as it were, from the human represented by the avatar).
EVE Online players, for example, already use a dashboard that tells them what’s going on in the vast universe their avatars inhabit. For their avatars, that is Mirrored Virtuality. When those avatars use heads-up displays on their spaceships, they are augmenting their reality. So how else might the virtual world enhance the experience of avatars through all eight realms of the Multiverse, and therefore enable the business to enhance the experience of their customers who play through those avatars? Reaching through the Realms is the way to find out.
Reaching Expedition Guidance
The Reaching expedition seeks to generate as many ideas as possible, in the shortest period of time, for creating new customer value on the digital frontier. This approach is no cookbook, but it does provide a method to employ the experience realms of the Multiverse in as fluid a way as possible. With that in mind, here are some guidelines to consider in keeping your ideation expedition on track while at the same time freeing your creativity to perform unlimited ideation:
∞ Go beyond the visual and aural to engage, or at least evoke, all five senses. We take experiences in with our senses, so the more senses more effectively engaged or virtually evoked, the richer the experience.
∞ Recognize that you can engage customers emotionally, physically, intellectually, and/or spiritually. Almost all experiences must have some level of emotional engagement to be effective; where can you employ the other three kinds?
∞ Since emotional engagement is so important, consider everywhere emotions can come into play. What role do the senses play to stir up emotions? How do those emotions bind or attract people to the experience or its intended result? Emotions prompt decisions. What decisions are you looking for your customers to make and what emotions will move them to act? What emotions will people return to experience time and again?
∞ View your ideas in the context of the bigger picture of the business model. Does the offering fit with an existing business model or does a new business model need to be created?6
∞ Think of how your ideas expand people’s capabilities for sensing, performing, linking, and organizing. Which capabilities do the technologies you encounter extend or enable? What capabilities are essential to the offering both as it is and as it might be?7
∞ Alternatively, for offerings centered on one particular capability, seek out what possibilities exist across the other three. If focused on linking, for example, how can you broaden sensing, enhance performing, and provide a means of organizing that currently does not exist? There are always opportunities on the digital frontier to further bolster human capabilities.
∞ Distinguish multiple types of customers, or personae, served in each realm. What are the primary characteristics of each persona? Which of them are your customers, but in a different realm? What opportunities do you have for helping currently underserved customers?
∞ Given that, go further to always examine how your offerings might be tailored to individual customers, particularly since anything that can be digitized can be customized.
∞ Distinguish the type of value created by offerings realm by realm. Look into these offerings, both your own and those of other companies, that create unique value in each realm. What experiences do these other companies stage? How do they create value? What technologies do they employ? Who are their customers? Ideas tend to spring forth from flushing out and diligently examining these en-route discoveries.
∞ Scrutinize the technologies of the realms. Which technologies are established in a realm? Which ones are fading, which ones emerging? What human capabilities do they enable? Are new capabilities emerging? How are the technologies employed to create value? What opportunities reveal themselves to apply established technologies? Where might the leading edge of technology cut next? What holes appear where needs cannot be satisfied by existing technologies that point to technology invention opportunities?
∞ Since experiences are the basis for transformations, and transformations provide greater value, think of what transformations you might build atop your experiences. What do your customers aspire to become? What core human needs are met by your offerings that could enable a transformation?
Also, as an explorer, be sure to record each possibility discovered throughout this expedition, capturing its essential descriptive elements without reflection during the ideation process. Only afterward should you switch from spontaneity to thoughtfulness in developing enough substance around each idea to more fully understand them. Try in particular to determine the principle or principles behind an idea, as these can then be used for further ideation.
Employing these guidelines, including answering the questions as you go along, makes your innovation process more effective by stimulating idea generation, guiding idea refinement, defining the opportunities, and laying the groundwork for the design of new offerings. By the end of your Reaching through the Realms ideation expedition, your pool of new ideas for creating new value for your customers, and capturing some of it for your company, should be overflowing. But Reaching is not the only idea generation method. The next expedition, Varying the Variables, takes idea generation in a whole new direction.