Innovation insights & cases
As a frontrunner in innovation consulting and research, Creax introduces a systematic approach to the fuzzy and unstructured world of innovation. Depending on your challenge, we assist in one or more stages of your innovation process. By detecting growth opportunities, solving production issues or finding new applications for existing products and materials.
Innovation in times of crisis
In times of crisis, everything changes. The only solution to be ready for the new normal is innovation. How to survive a crisis? Realise that innovation is crucial, be open for change (embrace it) and learn from what is known already. …
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Working from home – experiences from creax
The Corona virus forces us to work together in a new and isolated way. Thanks to the internet, we can work from a remote location, but there are some hurdles along the way. Here are some of our experiences and tips for working from home….
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What can we learn from previous SARS outbreaks
Every problem has already been solved by someone. Creax wondered in what extend this philosophy is being applied for dealing with the corona crisis. …
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Stop Corona! Download these posters
In times of crisis, what people need most is clear and correct information. We made posters that you can download with the two main messages to stop Corona: keep your distance + wash your hands…
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Why soap really helps against Corona
The main way in which the coronavirus can be transmitted is by human contact. It is a highly contagious virus, which is passed on from person to person in the small droplets of saliva that are released when someone who is already infected coughs or s…
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Innovation Fact 2 – Find the real problem
There are many reasons why products fail, but one of the most important ones is that solutions do not always solve the real problem. …
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Innovation Fact 3 – Focus on one thing
Focus on one thing and do it better than anyone else. Once you found clarity on your core values, focus on developing your product or service to optimally achieve these values. Do not let yourself be carried away by what you see around you. …
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Innovation Fact 4 – Learn to steal
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Focus on the function you are trying to solve, look around you and find inspiration to build upon. Then make it your own, optimize it and share it with the world….
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Innovation Fact 4b – Beware of the “not invented here” syndrome
We tend to criticize and discard ideas that did not originate from us, consciously or unconsciously. Beware of this and always look at ideas and concepts around you with an open mind and judge them by their value, not by their origin….
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Innovation Fact 5 – Don’t judge an idea too soon
Many technologies or products have been met with skepticism and laughter when they were launched. When you feel the urge to ridicule new products, try to have the reflex to objectively analyze that innovation. …
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Innovation Fact 6 – Embrace happy accidents
Breakthroughs often rely on the open-mindedness of innovators to notice something new, unexpected, and intriguing. Extensive cross-industry-research can inspire us to establish new links between previously separate components. No happy accidents per …
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Innovation Fact 7 – Keep it simple
Keeping things simple has many advantages. Look at your products or services and ask yourself: “Does it really need to be this complex?” Can I make it easier for users, without losing essential elements”?…
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Innovation Fact 8 – Too busy to innovate
Planning is essential for innovation – the pull of the ‘urgent, not important’ of routine tasks is just too strong. It’s time to take action and re-tune, plan more time for the important long-term projects, because these are the ones that will …
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Innovation Fact 9 – Learn to listen
By responding to the real needs and interests of your target groups, you learn how you can innovate. Never assume you know all there is to know about your product. Learn to listen and reap the benefits of the gathered insights….
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Innovation Fact 10 – Sell an old idea to someone new
Developing new solutions can be expensive, complex and risky. So why not identify new applications and markets for your existing knowledge and solutions? This lowers the risk and leads to new successes faster and cheaper….
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Innovation Fact 11 – You are never too big to fail
Innovation is often seen as risky, but it doesn’t have to be a fuzzy process of trial and error. By applying a proven method and understanding your industry and market, you can make informed decisions, removing the risk from innovation….
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Innovation Fact 12 – Know when to innovate
Getting the timing of innovation right is fundamental to maximizing the returns. Bad timing can lead to disaster, whether you get to market too early or too late. These are the items to consider….
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Innovation Fact 13 – Learn from the best: biomimicry
Biomimicry or learning from nature will only gain importance in the future. Before companies make any design decisions, they should ask: “How would nature solve this problem?”. …
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Innovation Fact 14 – Waste is money
What is of no use for you can still be valuable to someone else. Audit your waste stream. It can pay off to put some effort into identifying partners who are keen to take your waste and use it as a source material for their product….
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Innovation Fact 15 – Society changes, so should your company
Nothing is permanent except change. Pick up these societal changes as fast as possible and think about how they impact your business. And dare to disrupt your own business….
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Analyzing the plastic soup problem with CRT
The plastic soup is all over the news. A complex problem with many sides and factors. Therefore, it is hard to understand the root problems. In a case like that, a Current Reality Tree or CRT is very useful….
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FIYLTER – avoiding the plastic soup
The oceans have become a plastic soup filled with micro plastics. Creax analysed the problem, got creative and came up with a simple but effective and prize-winning concept: the FIYLTER. …
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Innovation Fact 16 – Robots will take your job
Do you fear that robots will take your job? A lot of jobs wil likely disappear, but it is up to us to arm ourselves against a future of uselessness. Learn to hit the ground running. …
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Innovation Fact 17 – It’s not because you can that you should
Stubbornly developing a product nobody wants will lead to disaster. So, think critically about your idea, discuss it with others any way and any time you can. Challenge your idea and adapt to new insights and understandings….
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Bringing focus to CO2 reduction with AI
How can we reduce CO2 levels to help our climate? The solution seems simple: take the best technology available and invest in it to develop it, scale it and implement it. To find it, we used artificial intelligence….
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Compîle – plastic soup skimmer
Millions of tons of plastics are floating around in our seas. Marine life often mistakes these plastics for food and chokes on it. The compîle plastic soup skimmer is an innovative, modular sun-powered solution designed to sieve the plastics out of …
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The battery car
The main challenges preventing mass adoption are the limited number of charging stations and long charge times. The Revive ‘battery car’ is a mobile charging station that can revive a car by charging it at home, work, or wherever it is parked. …
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The Need for Concrete Innovation
Innovation has become an indespensible part of modern-day business pratice. Every company has the word innovation somewhere in it’s mission. But they struggle to implement is successfully. So how should we define innovation? …
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Technology management step 1: identifying enabling tech
Technology identification for your innovation can start from scratch, or from looking at how your products and services can evolve and then spotting technologies that make that evolution possible. Bear in mind, however, that your discoveries in eit…
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Technology management: five steps to staying ahead
Every company aims to offer products or services that seamlessly match market needs. Many, however, overlook the importance of technology as a means to differentiate, build and retain their competitive edges. In an increasingly fragmented global te…
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Product launch fails: where did it go wrong?
Innovation is high on the priority list of most companies. However, despite early customer involvement, a well-understood tech landscape and the existence of countless innovation frameworks, companies are left scratching their heads when 50% of th…
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Science meets creativity: why it takes two to tango … and innovate
The constant interaction between scientific and creative minds in your team can take on many forms. In the end, however, the ultimate goal is to come up with big ideas that will boost your organization, but that are scientifically substantiated a…
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Leveraging open innovation: 6 key insights from our Innovation Roundtable
a small group of innovation enthusiasts to exchange insights and best practices. Hot topic of the day: open innovation. What did the conversation boil down to? These are the six main takeaways….
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The four essential steps towards open innovation success
American organizational theorist Henry Chesbrough was the first to dub this concept ‘open innovation’. Speaking out against traditional, closed product development processes, he introduced the ‘open innovation funnel’, encouraging companies t…
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Product innovation of a trolley: a 3-step journey
When we were asked to reinvent a carry-on trolley, we set up a systematic 3-step approach that started with building a multidisciplinary innovation dream team including product engineers, creative designers, chemists, physicists and marketers. …
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How to innovate efficiently: six ways to ‘unfuzzy’ the front-end of innovation
In many cases, innovation projects start off as chaotic and seemingly aimless ventures. At creax, we believe front-end fuzziness can and should be drastically reduced in order to innovate efficiently. …
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Cross Industry Innovation: someone may have already solved your problem
In 1946, Soviet inventor and science fiction writer Genrich Altshuller developed a methodology called TRIZ. It became known as “the theory of inventive problem-solving” and was based on a simple premise: across different disciplines and applications,…
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A thorough scan beyond pharma
Even advanced scientific companies like Pfizer sometimes face issues that seem almost impossible to tackle.To put an end to time-consuming manual quality inspections, the pharma player reached out to CREAX to explore alternatives from other indust…
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Avoid innovation paralysis – why all companies can and must embrace change
A lot of business leaders know they want innovation, yet they struggle to define what it actually means to them. Simply put, innovation is about making changes that add business value, in terms of either revenue growth or increased operational effici…
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Innovative packaging: A box packed with ideas
Telenet neede a new packaging for its digital tv setup box.We examined every possible aspect of the box: its contents, the logistic chain, distribution and customer needs, installation requirements and disposal options. We identified key properties…
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Innovation roundtable – How to increase your ‘return on innovation’?
While the importance of innovation is crystal clear for many organizations, daily execution usually remains challenging. When renewing products, services or business processes, companies often encounter the same obstacles. But what if companies cou…
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The Google car: new opportunities
Although the concept of the driverless car is fabulous, the design remains rather conventional. We believe the new car configuration makes it possible to break out of the traditional car set-up. We got inspired by the BMW Isetta and took this iconic…
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Vitalo: Is there a future for thermoforming?
Despite its strong market position, Vitalo questioned its future within the traditional thermoforming market because of margin pressure from the East. This uncertainty was the start of an intense collaboration between Vitalo and CREAX….
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The influence of patents on 3D printing evolution
Do patents stimulate or slow down growth? The modern patent system was created to help stimulate innovation. A patent gives its owner the right to stop others from using his invention for a limited period of time, thus providing him the opportunit…
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How to benefit from existing technology
Bobsleighing is a high-tech and innovative discipline. How to improve the conventional design of the sled and optimize the performance of the athletes? The solution is simple yet ingenious: transfer ideas & technologies from other industries that fa…
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Slideshare: 10 things that only existed in sci-fi movies
Sci-fi movies offer us a peek into the future. They let us dream of what might be possible. Interestingly, even the most bizarre dreams come true. We listed 10 sci-fi inventions which are plain technology today….
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Slideshare: thinking outside the box in packaging
For the Packaging Center of the University of Hasselt, Belgium, we explained how a structured approach to packaging innovation can help to unfuzzy the fuzzy front-end of innovation….
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7 unconventional reasons for filing a patent
Patents are used as indicator for innovation, but this sometimes mismatches the very nature of many patents filed today. You need to analyze patents in a systematic way, to get the bigger picture and a better understanding of the global technology …
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Rapid prototyping is much more than 3D printing
Due to the increased accessibility to additive manufacturing technologies – commonly referred to as 3D printing – this technique is now widely used in the product development process. Although we certainly believe this is one of the most exciting…
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How a simple method can spark innovation in complex industries
Some of the people we meet question the methodology we use to support the innovation process of companies.I can imagine this works for packaging but our industry/product is much more complex. How could this possibly work? We are convinced that even …
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New applications for waste streams
All industry domains experience generation of waste streams. These material flows are often seen as problems and are handled to limit their impact or, in the best case, to be recycled. The waste streams of one industry domain however, often have valu…
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Idea generation: bandaids
What do you do? Search for the First Aid kit (do we have that?), establish that the disinfectant is overtime (nevermind), try to open the bandaid box without spilling blood (oops), and struggle to apply a bandaid single-handedly (not easy!)….
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Cool, light, and strong: CREAX and Bekaert explore the possibilities of metal foam
Combining the advantages of metal with those of a permeable, lightweight material, metal foam lends itself to a wide variety of applications. Bekaert, a global player in advanced metal transformation, opened up a world of possibilities by lowering th…
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Idea generation: the solar still upscaled
The solar still principle is not new, but today it is mainly used in small applications. In this device, water is distilled using the heat of the sun. Time to take this principle to the next level. …
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10 guidelines for innovative design – Slideshare
This is how our lead designer Thomas inspired a international group of 60 industrial design students….
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Innovation through cross-industry learning: how is it changing the world?
Innovation through cross-industry learning transfers technologies across industries to revolutionize new product conceptss. We will illustrate the advantages of cross industry learning with a case study….
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Idea generation: Meet spiro, a new way of drilling
Isn’t it odd that you need a different drill bit for each hole you want to drill. We came up with Spiro, the drilling bot of the future. Set the diameter and depth, stick him to wall and Spiro will do the trick. Spiro is inspired on the technology …
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3 common pitfalls in process innovation
Process innovation projects are typically challenged with specific problems in the production process, waste stream validation or the need to increase overall process efficiency. It is striking to see that most companies have three pitfalls in common…
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Mapping alternative technologies for the paper pulp industry
We made a comprehensive technology mapping for the paper pulp industry. This industry was historically one of the largest polluters, but has recently been making the shift towards sustainable technologies….
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Infographic nanotechnology in plastics
A summary of the technology mapping we made in cooperation with Flanders’ PlasticVision. With this technology mapping we were able to give the plastic producers insight into the value of nanotechnology for their business. …
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10 innovations you thought were new – Slideshare
New innovations are not always as groundbreaking as you might think. Very often innovation is simply the result of continuous evolution and not that radical at all. We listed 10 innovations and show that some of them date back to more than 100 years …
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Technology mapping: the start of each innovation project
When you want to innovate, the first step should be to understand the technology landscape you are going to work in. Who else is playing the field? What are the latest trends? Do you know the strongpoints of a given technology? What are the threats? …
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10 misconceptions on innovation – Slideshare
There is a staggering amount of books on innovation, explaining what it’s all about. In this presentation we give you exactly the opposite. What are the 10 main misconceptions on innovation that people have?…
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Open Innovation Slideshare: only two things to remember
How to embrace open innovation? Map your own knowledge, look at other players in your field and learn from the entire world. Open up your innovation and increase your efficiency. …
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IN THE PICTURE
Infographic nanotechnology in plastics
A summary of the technology mapping we made in cooperation with Flanders’ PlasticVision. With this technology mapping we were able to give the plastic producers insight into the value of nanotechnology for their business.
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