About Us

The Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS) is an innovation consulting firm that helps product and service companies imagine new possibilities. We nurture an idea from a simple possibility to a completely functional reality. Together with our clients, we make new things possible.

What We Do

Over the past decade, CKS has provided an array of services to its clients, ranging from ethnography, to design, to user experience modelling, each of which is essential to the process of product or service innovation. We often begin a new cycle of innovation by studying how people behave and interact, with each other and with the things and surroundings in their lives. Rich photo and video documentations are brought into the studio to enable sensitization and for review in the form of analysis and concepting workshops. New ideas or solutions that are conceptualized are visualized and illustrated, and are described in depth and catalogued for future evaluation. Using paper or other material and digital concepts or prototypes, we return to the field to meet with the end-users of these solutions, in order to incorporate their feedback into the final solution development process.

The Range Of Our Work

CKS has close client engagements with Indian and global multinational corporations, with new start-ups, with non-profit organizations, and with diverse governmental agencies. We work in diverse sectors such as Aviation, Automobile, Retail and FMCG, Financial Services, Software Services, Internet and Telecommunication, Health Management and Public Services. Our work is spread across Asia and Africa, including repeat experiences in field sites from South Africa to China, from Nigeria to the Philippines.

How We Think About Innovation

Innovation is the ability to think about the possibilities of tomorrow. We develop these ideas today so they can be a reality tomorrow. At CKS, we see things anew, we let our analysis and imagination merge to create the future of products and experiences.
It is in order to be able to see things from different perspectives that we have within our team, specialists from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds, including all disciplines of Design, Anthropology, Sociology, Media Studies, Communications, Human Factors, Engineering, and Management.

In our decade long experience, we have seen that Innovation arises through a combination of divergent and convergent thinking. An example of divergent thinking is the proposition of a number of different possible solutions, one after another, through brainstorming, perhaps in a workshop. Convergent thinking, on the other hand, requires a systematic organization of that kind of information, or the dedicated observation, time and again, to understand the failure to respond to a proposition. At CKS we bring together both convergent and divergent thinking to better synthesize all possibilities into a complete and unique whole.