Soem thoughts from Yves Behar, the famed designer, which apply equally well to public relations professionals who truly want to provide creative and strategic advice – not rehash old plans and work off standard scenario templates.

” … In order to innovate, you need to work closely with all the different people in this product development chain. Whether it’s your client or manufacturing or the way a product is shipped or the kind of technologies that are integrated, it’s only by mastering all these different levels of complexity, while keeping a very strong point of view in a very strong direction, that one can achieve a good result.”

When you take on a new job, how many questions do you ask? How deep into your client’s organization do you search for information and insight?

Q – What is the biggest barrier when trying to bring your ideas to reality?

Yves — Most of the time it’s the ability to change the status quo that exists in large systems – systems of manufacturing, systems of marketing, systems of selling. And most of the time, you need to find a way that your work can be new and different while working within an existing system. That’s the biggest challenge.”

How do you move from concept to buy-in to approval to execution – without burning bridges?

Excerpts from an Eastman Innovation Lab article.