Our story
I.
Smithery started in 2011 as an innovation consultancy, founded by John V Willshire. The guiding principle was to help organisations make things people want, rather than make people want things.
John was previously Chief Innovation Officer at a media agency in London, where he had worked for seven years. What he found curious was that despite the continuing rise of the internet, clients were still focussed only on short-term and shallow ways to use it to sell more of their existing products and services.
There was an opportunity to rebuild businesses with customers, from the initial research phase, through co-design, to marketing products and services at the end. It was possible to innovate in the 21st century in a completely different way, and there were enough visionary clients around who could glimpse it too.
II.
A few years into this first phase of Smithery, something became clear. The success of any innovation work was not simply dependent on the quality of it.
A new idea could be excellent, yet still bump into problems trying to get through an organisation; “We like it, but it’s not the right time”. To succeed in innovation, Smithery needed to operate with more systemic sensibilities.
Around 2014, Smithery became a Strategic Design practice, working in the liminal space between departments and disciplines, roles and responsibilities. Innovation work was a part of the process, but a broader scope was needed to understand how organisations could become more anticipatory and adaptable in rapidly changing times.
In 2016, Helen Willshire joined too, bringing a raft of public sector experience from the strategy department of Transport for London to complement John’s private sector experience. The nature of Smithery’s work expanded, taking more formal inspiration from futures thinking and systems thinking in order to shape pioneering new frameworks and practices.
III.
Today, Smithery is a vital partner for a variety of different organisations. We work especially well with those who value the benefits of combining deep thinking with exploratory action, in order to reframe and rethink a strategy fit for the future.
Rather than scaling to remain in one static domain, Smithery is a business which operates at scale when exploring new territories with clients. Our network of friends and collaborators are some of the brightest minds in any business, and where appropriate we will form amazingly inspiring teams to take on the toughest challenges.
Beyond this, Smithery is committed to expanding the knowledge base of these emergent ways of working. This means regularly working in the open to develop new frameworks and concepts, speaking at seminars and conferences, and releasing new experimental tools through the shop.
You must be logged in to post a comment.