About

Solve180 is a freelance consultancy with the purpose of helping organizations unlock their hidden opportunities for innovation.

Solve180 is founded upon the basic hypothesis that most organizations and organizational units contain within them a wealth of opportunities for high-impact innovation that are often relatively simple to unlock, but that tend to be overlooked. This hypothesis is based on the experience of working in different organizations in the medtech sector.

In each of these organizations it was possible to identify issues or problems that had existed for years without a satisfactory solution being found. In each of these cases, a mix of frustration and resignation had crept in. Often highly qualified people have worked hard on these problems, but have still failed to deliver the desired results. In many cases, a number of different solutions have been implemented over time, but without success. Some of the actual examples related to marketing were:

• A sales region where performance was under par in spite of strong efforts to change the situation.
• A product portfolio that in spite of high-quality products failed to take market share
• A customer base that did not grow in spite of apparently strong marketing plans
• A Key Account that in spite of dedicated investments refused to grow as expected

However, as it turned out, each of these partially-resolved problems held within them opportunities for transformative innovation. Innovation that allowed the organization to correct fundamental assumptions about itself and its customers, and – as a result – to vastly improve its performance (see “Examples” for more details). The only thing that was required was to a change in the problem-solving approach.

As argued by the proponents of design-thinking, reframing and other abductive problem-solving approaches, in the case of persistent problems, insisting on finding the right solution though analysis and deduction will often not bring success. Instead, you need to stop and examine the beliefs and assumptions you and your team have been bringing into the problem-solving process. Some of the key beliefs are likely to be inaccurate. When you identify and correct those beliefs, your understanding of the problem will change. You can now re-start your solution development process and expect a strong result.

The contribution of Solve180 is to help organizations identify issues that – if approached by the right problem-solving approach – have the potential to unlock transformative innovation.