The ?What If! Story
creating an innovation business - the ?whatif! story
The Problem
Back in 1992, Matt Kingdon and Dave Allan (both self-confessed innovation junkies) started to feel increasingly frustrated working within the bureaucracy of big corporate structures.
Both felt that big corporations had inefficient and damaging approaches to creative innovation, especially when it came to new product development.
Rather than just accepting the situation for what it was, Matt and Dave decided to do something about it
The Process
After several months of clandestine pub talk about setting up a creative agency, Matt and Dave had cracked the offer: to help super tanker corporates become innovation speed boats.
Over a few months the start-up fund, of just £20,000 was scraped together.
Like everything in the early days the ?What If! name was developed as a result of an informal brainstorm session, whilst on a beach somewhere. Someone said they liked the word ‘if’, then someone else said ‘yeah, as in ‘what if’. And that was it.
The business opened its doors on Sept 28th 1992 in a rather dingy office in Pimlico.
In the subsequent years the business has stuck to its mantra of “recruit superstars only” and has retained the original entrepreneurial, collaborative and creative ethos throughout all its offices by being a strongly values-led business.
The Solution
Today there are three core service offers:
1. Innovation Capabilities
Here the focus is on an organisations most precious asset - people
- ?What If! create structures and mechanisms that support and sustain innovation.
- ?What If! develop training programmes that increase the innovative skills of talent, particularly around creativity and insight.
- ?What If! also organise study tours and events that create the opportunity for people to meet with and share the secrets of world class innovators.
2. Innovation Projects
Working in genuine collaboration with clients, ?What If! invent or enhance existing: products, services, brands and customer experiences.
3. Ventures
We work in partnership with our clients and entrepreneurs to launch and grow new and existing businesses. ?What If! Ventures provides it's expertise, network and capital in return for a stake (or equivalent) in the venture.
We run this unit as a separate team, with management and staff operating and sitting separately to our inventing team.
We finance most ventures ourselves, but we'll sometimes accept third party capital into the deals we do.
The Results
- ?What If! is now a company of over 180 of the world’s brightest and nicest human beings.
- ?What If! is also the world’s largest independent innovation company.
- There are offices in London, Manchester, Shanghai and New York with others planned and the team work in over 40 countries worldwide.
- The client list includes: Unilever, Pepsico, Cadbury Schweppes, Nestle, Shell, BT, ABN AMRO, Astra Zeneca, British Airways, Coors Brewers, Sainsbury’s, Boots and McDonalds.
- ?What If! was voted ‘Best Place to Work in the UK’ in 2004 and 2005.
