Chelsi Nakano
March 07, 2017
The SF Bay Area is known for its booming innovation, but that didn’t stop Mohi Ahmed and Dave Marvit of Fujitsu from setting out to improve the way it’s approached. Fujitsu’s Open Innovation Gateway aims to decentralize the processes familiar to a typical innovation center, allowing ideas to freely connect, grow, and advance out into the world. In order to communicate the importance of this program, Prezi was chosen.
Somewhere between slides and video
Ahmed and Marvit, respectively senior director and lead strategist of the Open Innovation Gateway, knew they needed something more innovative than slides to tell their story. While video was initially considered, it was ultimately too particularizing. “If you’re talking about deforestation and you show a tree getting knocked down, it’s a tree getting knocked down. It’s not deforestation,” explained Marvit. “Video is good for instances, not the abstract. We needed to communicate the philosophy behind our goals and methodologies, and Prezi is best for that.”
The end result was a prezi that moved and sounded like a video, but used still illustrations and metaphor to tell a story. The colony of ants acknowledges the vastness of innovation, such as how many individual moving parts feed into the overall process, as well as highlights the importance of working together. After all, ideas can come from anywhere. Complete with voiceover, Marvit described the prezi as “somewhere between a video and a PowerPoint.”
It served as a communication tool for the Open Innovation Gateway, and could either be pitched in a meeting along with additional materials (such as success stories), or embedded on a website as a standalone, on-demand piece of content. “We could also print out the entire prezi and use it as a table mat,” added Ahmed. “It could be used for many different purposes.”
The right amount of information at the right time
When asked why else Prezi seemed like the right choice of platform for the Open Innovation Gateway, Marvit recalled the order in which the information was revealed. “With Prezi we can give away small details first and then zoom out to reveal how each of them connect, which lends us real credibility,” he explained. “People in Silicon Valley have come up with big ideas, but when you start a presentation with claims that seem too lofty, your audience is going to disengage.”
Interested in learning more about why the Prezi platform works? Download our eBook on the science of effective presentations below.
