Innovation and creativity are not just buzzwords, they are essential cornerstones for any forward-thinking business. We at MMG, are big believers in thinking differently, cultivating a culture of creativity, and fostering innovation in everything we do. We can’t help ourselves, it’s in our Disney DNA! Our team of experienced and practiced Innovation Catalysts can help you get outside your comfort zone, look at your business challenges from a different angle, and use consumer-insights to ensure customer-centric solutions to problems. We use a structured design thinking process, very similar to the process used at Disney, to help you transform your business and develop novel solutions to challenges.
MMG’S team of experienced Design Thinking experts, Lee Kitchen and Sura Al-Naimi are former Disney Innovation Catalysts and have successfully utilized their proven method to solve many business challenges in a wide variety of companies and industries.
Lee Kitchen is a 5-star Innovation Catalyst, Keynote Speaker, Workshop Leader, Culture-Change Agent, Design Thinking Trainer, and overall MAGICAL DUDE! Lee brings a wealth of experience as a Certified Master Facilitator and long-term innovation agent. In his 32-year career at Walt Disney World, Lee led many creative sessions to solve real-world business problems using his design thinking and creative problem-solving expertise, which helped many teams across the company think differently about their challenges. Lee’s marketing experience includes launching some of Walt Disney World's most memorable and celebrated attractions, events, and marketing campaigns including the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival, Disney’s Annual Holiday Celebration, the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival, the Year of a Million Dreams campaign, and the introduction of Disney Cruise Line’s Disney Dream and Disney Fantasy.
Sura Al-Naimi has been in the world of innovation and creativity for quite some time as well. She is a former Global Innovation Officer in Disney’s internal think tank, B2B tech, and luxury jewelry entrepreneur, and challenger strategist at the What If Innovation Group, Synectics, and EatBigFish. Sura has bridged the worlds of startups and Fortune 100 organizations: Disney, Hyperloop, Facebook, Chick-Fil-A, Levi’s, Kaiser Permanente, and Barilla to name a few. Sura uses a “big picture” approach, leveraging innovation and creativity frameworks, tools, and mindsets to help solve the toughest challenges. She unleashes a growth mindset in teams by inviting them to consider what is possible when they think differently together, and collaborate to create big change.
At the heart of it all is the consumer. We use proven empathy tools to ensure that consumer-centricity is at the center of everything we help you accomplish, using data you have - or data we collect for you - to uncover unmet needs, creating campaigns, products, and services that speak directly to your customers’ wants and needs. We offer custom design thinking training and workshops that skill up every member of your organization, infusing creativity, and different thinking into every project they work on. By using these design thinking methods to approach challenges, your company will create new, disruptive products, services, and campaigns that will drive constant and consistent growth and culture-change to differentiate you from your competitors.
MMG offers customizable sessions under each category of the design thinking process. Our in-house innovation catalysts can lead your team in a variety of productive and collaborative sessions that can:
Sessions are fully customized to your group and unique business challenge based on challenge level, number of participants, the extent of tangible idea deliverables, and final report-out presentation structure/involvement.
Design Thinking Boot Camp – MMG offers various training programs to skill your teams up in the use of design thinking and creative problem solving as a discipline. This training can be customized to the budget and needs of your team in 2,4, 8, or 16-hour packages in both the virtual or in-person environment. This training is instrumental in creating a culture of innovation within your company. Those participating in this boot camp will learn creativity and innovation tools, behaviors, and techniques in addition to practical idea generation, idea developing, and pitching skills from expert practitioners of the craft. The training includes real-time stories using these tools and techniques from our extensive Disney experience as well as stories from the innovation world at large.
Also, MMG offers specialized innovation training packages and workshops that can hyper-focus on each stage of the process, diving deeper into each section with advanced tools and techniques for scoping, empathizing, ideating, and idea developing/prototyping. Each session is usually 2-4-6 hours and can be held both in-person or virtually.
Sometimes your team needs a pep-talk. MMG offers many different styles of innovation and creativity keynotes delivered by our expert, former Disney Innovation Catalysts. These keynotes are introspective, interactive, and fun sessions that motivate participants to realize their creative potential and to use that information to challenge themselves, in both their personal and professional lives. Keynote topics include:
Keynotes are offered in 30-45-60-90 minute increments and are available both in-person and virtually.
In this new ‘work-from-home’ world we live in, virtual video (Zoom) sessions can get repetitive, tiring, and frankly, BORING. At MMG we’ve refined our virtual sessions to be just the opposite: fun, interactive, and memorable using a variety of techniques and tricks from our design thinking dashboard to help participants engage, participate and enjoy our sessions. This is key to the creativity and innovation work we do here at the MMG Design Thinking Studio, and we think you will see a huge difference in both the virtual sessions themselves and the outcomes they produce.