Inside HFS
We are a global insights, foresight, and strategy consultancy. We help organizations understand the humans in their lives better and how the future will change their business. This helps us provide a foundation for strong strategy and innovation.
We help our clients create products, services, and strategies by being their eyes and ears in a complicated world. We help them understand the richness of the world outside their front doors and how to participate in shaping positive change for themselves and their users, customers, patients and consumers.
We firmly believe good strategy and innovation come only out of rigorous, human-centric research. Strategy without quality research is doomed to fail, so it makes sense to build a solid understanding of the real, current and future lives of those people.
We offer a set of services that stand apart from most other agencies. With a senior team that has years of experience providing bespoke approaches that tackle your smallest problems and your biggest challenges, we work to teach the next generation of researchers and develop the next set of research methods that will shape commercial innovation.
Insights @ HFS
We blend anthropology, behavioural economics, strategy, foresight and design into a seamless human-centred approach.
We are insights specialists. Our team is made up of anthropologists, sociologists, design researchers, and behavioural economists. It’s a senior team of people with advanced degrees, who speak multiple languages, and have years of commercial research experience.
Despite being a small team, we’re global. Already embeded in Korea, China, Japan, Europe, and the Americas, we are able to offer deep local experience and immediate access to markets that are relevant to your business.
We offer a balanced insights practice with deep qualitative and quantitative experience. We do ethnography, UX research, design-specific research, and semiotics to help you understand people from cultures around the world. We also study behaviour at scale with our quantitative practice.
Ultimately, we offer real research—with total focus on actionability—that benefits from a deep understanding of the tools, methods, and processes that aren’t available anywhere else. That helps us choose the right tool for the job and to execute it well. The result is research that lays the foundation for great strategy and innovation.
The Human Futures Approach - We developed the human futures approach as a way to seamlessly integrate insight and foresight.
Our insights look beyond the current state, and help us examine how thoughts, beliefs, and actions change over time. This allows us to trace behaviour into the future and understand how cultural shifts will impact your business after your innovation hits the market.
We include future change into our understanding of human needs, thought, and action.
Foresight @ HFS
We blend anthropology, behavioural economics, strategy, foresight and design into a seamless human-centred approach.
We take a rigorous approach to foresight strategy. In order to avoid the pitfalls of crystal ball futurism and data-thin trend work, we use a deeply evidence-based approach to examine the weak signals, humans, drivers, trends, and possibilities that shape how the future will unfold. Our perspective on the future is grounded in empirical, reasoned research. We can show our work and prove why we got the conclusions we did. This makes our foresight rigorous, testable, and repeatable. We don’t jump on the bandwagon. We don’t just talk about fashionable topics. We help our clients examine the future as it might be. There’s no snake oil here.
But we also know foresight is not functional without actionability. This comes from our focus on storytelling and impact. We help our clients create the compelling narratives needed to enact change within, and outside, their organizations. We help them to understand the impact their actions, and inaction, will have on the way their innovations, products, and services will have on the world of their customers. We also help them understand how they can participate in creating more positive futures for everyone.
The Human Futures Approach - We developed the human futures approach as a way to seamlessly integrate insight and foresight.
We humanize perspectives on the future. Our foresight process puts human thought, belief, and action at the centre of everything. Conventional foresight strategy and trend analysis looks for drivers as the key features of change. But there are people behind these drivers. We examine the human roots in everything and show how people change the world through their actions. We then help our clients understand what impact this will have.
Strategic Growth + Transformation
These programs often involve challenging an organization to critically assess its role, value proposition and core competencies in relation to changing market conditions and behaviours as well as the disruptive potential of new technology. Delivery is focused on re-aligning enterprise vision and strategy with emerging opportunity spaces and downstream innovation / investment programs.
Insights + Foresight for Innovation
In these engagements we typically develop human and market understanding to influence innovation and design programs with a view towards 1-3 year timelines. In most cases this work informs strategic frameworks, innovation requirements, and human centered design principles that can be directly applied to pipeline and portfolio management, ideation, concept development, and prototyping. Delivery is focused on supporting new products, services, and/or customer experiences for a specific LOB, segment, category or brand.
Applied Learning + Development
We help organizations build, augment, and improve their internal approaches to insight and foresight. This can include teaching a team how to do ethnography in a series of workshops. But it can also include providing a new perspective on how to do research and how to grow this new model in the business. We can come in to augment an existing team. We can train the team. We can help you to find new team members to fill specific roles. We can also help to refine existing processes and practices so your research is robust and rigorous enough to meet the growing challenges of innovating in a world in crisis.
