Connecting McLaren Businesses to their markets
The Design Strategy team's mission was to connect McLaren Applied's business units, design and technology with key market insights in order to understand their impact against our product strategy and R&D investment. We believe this is key to remaining competitive, anticipate market needs, and stay at the forefront of technology.
Define trends
Collected observations & hunches transforming them into trends
Worked with engineers to understand future capability of technology to solve future market needs
Define opportunities for McLaren Applied
Collaborated with business units to merge trends with market challenges
Evolve strategy to increase usability
Increased value and usability of report for business units and employees
Ideate & synthesise
Facilitated workshops to innovate around future market needs
01 My role
Create future visions of McLaren Applied
02 What we delivered
A physical and digital report with macro trends and micro trends. Each micro trend has an example product or service concept showcasing how McLaren could add value with their capability.
Together with the business we used the trends to fabricate visions of possible futures and imagined problems that might still be beneath the surface. This enabled us to conceptualise tangible products and services that could support short term and long term innovations. The report was used to inform R&D, support strategy, inspire employees and used as external thought leadership.
The Report
Flick through a section of the report
Examples of MAT visions within report
03 Approach
We evolved the approach to look broader and take into consideration social, political, economic, environmental, and technological observations. This helped lay strong foundations in order to monitor how these trends may advance to impact our business in the coming years.
During the process we engaged with the business units and portfolio teams to help prioritise trends that were most impactful. Working in this way built a lot of excitement around the report and across the business as it was an opportunity for people to see how we could build a better future together.
04 Process Highlights
1. Trend analysis and definition
The trends are synthesised through the analysis of hundreds of observations of technological, political, economic, environmental, and societal news and events of the past year. They were sourced from some of the most influential players in technology, design, and business today including; Frog, Fjord, Wired, Deloitte, PWC, Gartner, Forrester, Nielson, the Economist, Forbes, MIT, CES, Futurism, and many more.
2. Business & Tech Collaboration
During a series of Business unit workshops we analysed market insights and customer needs against their framework to understand the context of their product roadmaps. collaborating with the Business units in this way allows us to uncover opportunities and recommendations for their strategy together.
Building on the trends, we worked together with both the Business Units and Portfolio Teams to understand and create hypotheses of how these trends could result in products and services that we expect to see in market and impact products we engineer in 2019 and beyond.
3. External Reporting
The Trends and Foresight report delivers an MAT view of the world that stimulates debate on the future and leads to exciting R&D submissions from across the business. We worked closely with marketing to deliver a version of the report that we can share with our customers and the outside world.
©Melissa Butterworth 2022