I used to think embarking on a sales drive, with all its repetitive time consuming processes, meant that proper thinking had to be put on hold. Not any more.
A few months back at i.ngen.io we decided that timing was good to approach a number of targeted Spanish corporates with a relatively generic corporate communications product prototype. After a lot of emails and a decent number of meetings, the very fact that we were immersed in this process alerted us to a connected but different potential product arising from a more verifiable and/or immediate market need.
Could we have thought about this on our own, sitting in front of our computers? It is possible, but most probably experience tells us it would not have happened. Desktop thinking tends to go for more abstract, bigger, greenfield projects. Sitting in front of a client, who can barely squeeze a short meeting in a packed daily agenda, ideas do tend to sharpen considerably. They need to adapt to real daily problems faced.
Over the next few months we will be working on this new lead to try to develop a cloud-based presentation software specially designed for storytelling in data-intensive situations.
