Fancy playing games all day? and get paid for it? Well this pretty much seems like the dream job!
Ben & Andrew, is a problem solving business - using creativity techniques to solve business, cultural and social problems that their clients face. Sitting somewhere between a creative agency and a management consultancy. The gap in the market as Ben explains is that creative agencies have brilliant new ideas but can't really apply their ideas practically, whereas management consultancies are engaged to make things happen and take the organisation to new places but they don't really have a lot of creativity .
Ben has built a company that uses creativity to solve problems - sounds a lot of fun. Their client list is diverse - for profit , cultural organisations and those in the social impact sector. They work with global international companies to 2/3 people charities - finding that the learnings from each are very valuable to each other. Ben explains their business model is not designed around delivering a certain thing so they have flexibility to find the right answer, not just what suits them as a company. They help solve in partnership with their clients problems such as 'how can we engage a certain kind of customer with a product.', 'sales are dropping in this part of our business and we aren't sure why?'
So how do they do this? They play games with clients: snap, dominios, amongst others, and are intentionally provocative to test where the edges lie. They test, tweak, test and tweak. Working around the world running innovation workshops, Milan to Mumbai and India to Italy - solving problems sounds a pretty good mission to me.
What you'll learn from my interview with Ben:
- How they got it off the ground
- How they have created a business around creatively solving problems
- What the girl effect is
- How to write a book in 5 days
Favourite book
Creativity Inc - Overcoming the forces which stand in the way of true inspiration by Ed Catmull Dr
Ben and Andrews bumper book of fun and games (out soon!)
Favourite Quote
"The moment you get attached to one point all the other possibilities shut down" - Unknown
Productivity Hack
Tool they use with clients to help them make difficult decisions
Links
On twitter @benandand
I really hope enjoyed the interview with Ben. If you have any thoughts or comments about this episode, please do share them with us on Twitter or Facebook – we’d love to hear from you!
And finally, if you get a chance I would be hugely grateful if you could leave an honest review for The Mission Driven Entrepreneurs Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They're so important to the ranking of the show and I do read every one. If you've left one already, thank you so much!
Thanks again to Ben for sharing his story with us.