CEMEO - Design Thinking expertise, conferences and workshops, consulting, training and coaching

Design thinking & innovation
Event hosting, workshops, seminars, consulting & coaching
About us
CEMEO is a consultancy specialized in design thinking and innovation.

We host design thinking and innovation workshops, as well as seminars to boost creativity, for companies, non-profit organisations and local communities. We also advise these organisations about the best way to innovate or create new products, programmes or services and we coach their managers to help them setup work environments and processes that facilitate and encourage innovation.

Benoît Quémar, founder of CEMEO, is also a speaker on design thinking at conferences, and he hosts events or coach clients for thecamp, Adgency Experts, Bloomco, A-Speakers, the CFPJ (Abilways) and for other agencies or training institutes, in English or in French, in France or abroad.
Design thinking
Design thinking is for everyone and is not restricted to designers. It's not a strict methodology but a way of thinking and doing, and it's not a series of brainstorming meetings; it's more than that. It's a way to think, conceive, design, build and test a product, a service or a programme, following some basic principles that include empathy, the right to make mistakes, fast prototyping and fruitful collaboration, in order to find a solution that's agreed upon and supported by everyone, not a compromise that would have winners and losers. In design thinking, everybody wins.

Design thinking can be used anywhere, at work and at home, alone or in conjunction with methods like Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, etc. Design thinking is done in phases, which can vary depending on the approach or informal "school" of design thinking that's chosen, but it always has some common elements.

Intuition & analysis
Design thinking combines the intuition from the designer and the analysis from the engineer. It calls on all parts of the brain (left, right, limbic, cortical).
Principles
Design thinking includes:
1. To feel empathy for clients and users
2. To define their needs
3. To generate ideas
4. To prototype, explore, accept errors, and often
5. To test, mesure, refine
6. To collaborate
Desirable, feasible, viable
Design thinking allows to quickly and simply imagine, conceive, build and test, products, programmes or services that are desirable, feasible and economically viable.
Workshops
During our discovery or operational workshops, participants work in teams of 5 to 12 people, depending on the type of workshop and the size of the entire group. Without any digital distraction, device or screen, the teams only use paper, pens and everyday objects, along with some specific matrices or tools, to come up with solutions fast.

Discovery workshops offer a one-day discovery of design thinking in a sort of crash course that's designed to open minds and get people to practice all phases of design thinking (except the test one) in several hours. Far from a theoretical course, such practical and effective workshop proves that design thinking can be used by anyone for any project, product or service, in any situation and at any time.

Operational workshops are for organisations which already know and use design thinking in their projects. These workshops focus only on one phase of the design cycle at a time, and they happen regularly along the duration of the project, from start until launch (and after launch for adjustment). We host this kind of workshops directly, or we advise, help and coach the people in the organisations who host these events, depending on their ressources available in-house.
Seminars & conferences
We also host or co-host seminars and conferences that allow organisations to acquire new ways to work and methods that support, trigger and facilitate creativity and innovation, while making sure that their projects are doable and viable or profitable.

These one-day, two-day or three-day events are custom-made for the specific needs of the client, to which we offer tools to help structure and organize their idea generation processes and their actions. As well, during these seminars we give the client benchmarking data and examples from all over the world to compare their ideas, projects or products with similar ones.

These days include both plenary sessions and workshops in subgroups. Design thinking itself is mentioned and referred to during these seminars with regards to its principles, but their format is not that of the design thinking workshops described above.
Testimonials

"A very structured approach, efficient and pragmatical"
"We tested a design thinking workshop with CEMEO to solve an urban planning issue. I was happily surprised to discover a very structured approach, efficient and pragmatical. It has allowed us, in a very short time, and for a 20-person and very diverse group, to answer the question in a very discerning way."
Aline de Marcillac, Mayor of Ville d'Avray (Hauts-de-Seine, France)
"A real dynamic push. Thanks!"
"Benoît Quémar came to the annual summer seminar of CUBIK Partners, thanks to Adgency Experts. We were thus able to discover design thinking in details in a day, and that it's a complementary approach to our training business. A very good host and instructor, Benoît knew how to pass on the principles of design thinking to us, but also how to immediately apply them to our strategic thinking, which allowed us to initiate a whole new offer of services. Thanks to his passion for design thinking and his proficiency in the matter, combined with a down-to-earth approach, Benoît quickly drove the entire CUBIK team into this new way of thinking with a real dynamic push. Thanks to him!"
Camille Durr, Associate & Managing Director, CUBIK Partners, France
Books
We particularly like these books or guides and we highly recommend them for anyone interested in or curious about design thinking.

design thinking - Accélérez vos projets par l'innovation collaborative
Stéphane Biso & Marjorie Le Naour - Dunod
In French, a very good presentation of design thinking.
Change by Design
Tim Brown - Pearson
A solid reference with many real-life examples, by the boss of IDEO, a leading design thinking agency.
Design Thinking Methodology Book
Emrah Yayici - ArtBizTech
A very good methodology to practice design thinking. Available as an e-book.
The CAT
FrogDesign.com
A very useful toolkit put together by FrogDesign: the Collective Action Toolkit (CAT)
Contact us
Everything starts with you and will go back to you
+33 6 76 13 17 85
+33 6 76 13 17 85
info@cemeo.fr
Name

Email

Message

Comment