Our research and analysis is based on our experience with the leaders in automotive innovation – Honda and Toyota.
We follow a very strict “Go see for yourself” philosophy that helps prevent our customers from falling into the age-old trap of “Board-Room Innovation”. Often executives find themselves disconnected from their customer and their behavior. Under pressure to improve and produce new products, they don’t really put themselves in the shoes of their customers and then don’t understand why the process process change and new product was never adopted.
Take the case of Quicken, that innovated to eliminate the terms “Debit” and “Credit” because their customers found the terms too confusing, and replaced it with “Withdrawal” and “Deposit”.

Here's a simple example where we think that the principle was highlighted clearly:
Service Technicians at Automotive dealerships normally use an intuitive methodology of diagnosing faults with cars. Hence when a diagnostic tool is plugged into the OBD (computer) port of a car, typically some Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTC) are raised. DTC codes typically will generate multiple choices in the Technicians mind, which are then eliminated via some additional trouble shooting. So for example if C1225 is a code for the ABS light that has turned-on on the dash, the first area that the technician may look at is the ABS modulator. The second may be the Wheel Speed Sensor (WSS) and so on. An automotive manufacturer decided to design a system that would help the Service Technicians leverage the experience of the other technicians in the field.
In our example we highlight how they designed a product without incorporating feedback from the Service Technicians and the actual diagnostic process that they use in the field. The system was designed with a hierarchy of trouble shooting questions.

"Have you checked the ABS Modulator"?
"Did it pass the test"?
"If it did not, did you check the WSS"?

Since Service Technicians work in a flat fee environment, i.e. each repair has a fixed time budgeted to it, soon the technicians stopped using the system.
To top it all, if a diagnosis was not made after going through a series of questions, the technician was asked to fill out a full page questionnaire that gave them a random number which had to be keyed in to the phone system to gain access to the troubleshooting desk at the Auto OEM.

What we are trying to highlight here is a simple principle often used to design solutions – an inside-out process. So the designers did not understand how the process really worked and used the # of calls coming in to the troubleshooting desk as a measure of success. As technicians got fed up with the process, the number of calls went down, but warranty costs went up as the Service Technicians kept experimenting with a hit and miss approach of troubleshooting. We helped re-design the system to make it work like a simple search engine. In a text box you type in C1225 + make model and year of the car and the top 10 repairs showed up for that make model and year of the car with a green bar (visual cue) showing how often the repair fixed the problem.

A simple fix that took into account how the technician actually worked was all that was needed. A simple and pragmatic approach with measurable results.

Creative thinking and sound business judgement:

We use a process that requires that you simplify the solution into many smaller measurable phases. Each phase is then prioritized, implemented, the results measured and fed back into the next phase.
We allow for failure, and we expect some of the phases to fail or not succeed completely. Learning from failure leads to success as long as the final goal is kept in sight.

We don’t invent new ways of solving problems when they have been invented. You will see a lot of similarity between the way we approach problem solving with Lean Techniques or Six-Sigma methodologies. We are not prescriptive in our problem solving approach and mix and match standard techniques with unique processes designed for the situation. We back recommendations where possible with data and in new uncharted territory with the consensus of human experience.

Results oriented and execution driven:

Our approach is focused on solution adoption, which requires understanding the needs of the ultimate consumer of the product or service being delivered.  If the supply chain is not followed to the ultimate point of consumption, the results is usually suboptimum, or worse - a result that the final consumer doesn’t want.  For example, when we work with an Auto Manufacturer in optimizing their supply chain, we also focus on the car buyer to understand clearly what affects their choices of color and other configurations. Optimizing the selection available at each dealer to match the mix of cars that consumers want means inventory can be reduced, or more cars can be sold from the same inventory.

Technology with an edge:

In addition to being business/business process focussed, we use/are familiar with several bleeding edge technologies such as - Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft .NET 3.5+, Microsoft Silverlight/Blend, Microsoft Solver Foundation, open-source development and deployment tools, open-source linear programing solvers as well as Content Management Systems such as DotNetNuke, Joomla and Drupal.