To create great ideas and great innovations we need stimulus. Take this interesting innovation in the coffee space. If you thought there was a limit to how many ways you can pimp your cup o’joe, you may not have realized that you can print your favorite picture on your latte foam.
Taiwan’s Let’s Café –the in-house coffee shop of the FamilyMart convenience store chain–wanted to make sure that customers could really see themselves in their cups.
The fine folks at Let’s Cafe (a cafe within a convenience store), went beyond the coffee space to come up with new ideas using seemingly unrelated worlds to find new and different ways to bring a new jolt to a customer’s java experience. They made brand new connection using seemingly unrelated information. They cleverly found a way to use information from the worlds of cel phone usage, printing and photography to “offer a better cafe experience against bigger more established chains with proper stores”. It not only takes advantage of these unrelated worlds to change the product, but the stimulus from these worlds no doubt includes bits about behaviors, too and helps bring a brand new emotional experience to the process of getting coffee, allowing for the innovation to be more powerful than caffeine. It is certainly a WOW moment when you see your pic a float on your latte.
A latte art customization that is ridiculously unique and fun.
As the article suggests it is not totally new, but a large difference is that it takes the experience out of the barista’s hands and puts it in the hands of the consumer. Again, going beyond just the product and innovating the experience.
See how it works here
The more robust the stimulus, the more robust the innovation. Brewing up insights and stimulus from seemingly unrelated places is a great way to percolate new perspectives. It is grounds for new WOW moments! Although it might be more challenging, it could be that shot of espresso your innovation journey needs.
WOW!
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