By Agatha Wong
Immersive virtual rooms, collaborative spaces with touchscreen spaces and predictive data — these no longer belong to the realm of science fiction and the imaginative halls of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. At Symrise’s newly-opened Digital Immersion Co-Creation Centre in Singapore, customers can look forward to a new frontier in the realm of product innovation and development.
Merging market and consumer insights with sensory delights, and well as a portfolio of flavour solutions, Symrise has designed an open arena equipped with touchscreens, and customisable meeting and discussion spaces. In addition to demo kitchens, the co-creation centre is divided into three highlights:
In the centre’s main area, called the Istana, visitors are greeted by the large interactive main screen and a spacious lounge area. Just close by, they can also access Symrise’s flavour language, Symscript, with different flavours — ranging from citrus and vanilla to meaty flavours — available just a touch away on a digital catalogue. Here, customers can discover their designed note and profile in a concise and efficient manner.
The centre also features a consumer immersion studio — a workspace where consumers experience and discuss products in real-world scenes, from cafes to parks. In this simulated environment, brought to life through immersive projection, customers and consumers are encouraged to engross themselves in the moment of enjoying food and drink in a familiar space, allowing them to provide better feedback through an understanding of emotional responses.
Lastly, the insights studio offers autonomous ambient settings for focused exploration. An insights table featuring six large touchscreens allow collaborators to explore and draw connections across data and insights sources; through sharing their information with each other, they can also generate new insights for future products and solutions.
The Digital Immersion Co-Creation Centre is underscored by the company’s Symvision AI flavour trend prediction tool, which delivers information based on current trends and predicted roadmaps for the food and beverage industry. Together with other social listening tools and predictive models, customers can benefit from a plethora of market knowledge, offering them a multi-sensorial experience for prototype development, evaluation, and validation.
By tapping into these digital tools, Symrise has added a new dimension into the realm of product innovation — evolving from not merely product testing in laboratory environments, to also incorporating digital elements that understand consumers on a more personal level.
