How Muse drives Innovation

Innovation Challenge

With the success of their brain sensing headband, Muse by Interaxon was growing, and growing quickly. Over 50,000 people have experienced Muse’s brain-sensing technology, and this continues to grow. As the company scales, they were looking for a way to steward their culture to maintain an environment focused on creativity, positivity, and results.

As our team has grown, it’s hard to maintain that same level of resonance and vibrance. It’s very easy to think that you have a great culture and that people are really happy,
but do we really go and check that?
— Chris Aimone, CTO, Muse

See how tech darlings Muse are driving innovation through culture:

Working Together

As a company, Muse is focused on helping people of all walks of life live a happier, healthier, and more connected life with leading brainwave technologies and experiences. They are focused on making the intangible inner world of meditators… tangible. They were looking for a partner who could help do the same thing for culture. Make the unknown, known.

Muse partnered with The Moment to measure and intentionally tune their innovation culture. They were specifically looking to gain clarity on what parts of their culture they might not be seeing, what could be holding them back, and where they could accelerate progress. Using The Culture Scan, Muse employees participated in group sessions to define and populate their culture, as they were seeing it.

Together, we helped them to identify and rate 30 key elements within 6 sections:

• Behaviours
• Infrastructure
• Activities
• Values
• Structures
• Dynamics

Once each of the 30 elements were identified and rated, Muse was able to completely visualize the areas of their culture that were helping them, and those that were hindering progress.

With this information, Muse gained clarity on immediate actions they could take to support their company-wide growth, and what they could stop doing that was getting in their way.

Understanding and discovering what’s great, and probing into what could be, is something The Moment continues to help clients with.
— Mark Kuznicki, Co-Founder, The Moment

The Culture Scan is a tool that clearly articulates the difference between the culture that we say we want, and the culture that we actually have—and provides a map between those two worlds.

What’s Changed

For many companies, or divisions within larger companies, it’s natural to rely on a group of close knit people with a shared passion to build a compelling culture. You trust one another and tend to share a similar mindset in overcoming challenges.

As Muse grew, however, it became apparent that culture was something that needed attention; it was a large part of the underpinning structure for positive growth and employee satisfaction.

It’s a big question about who to work with on something as soft and intangible as your culture. I’d say we worked with The Moment because we really trust them.
— Chris Aimone, CTO, Muse

Using The Culture Scan, Muse was able to identify the 30 unique elements that made up their culture and start to shift behaviors and mindsets in new directions to improve upon the baseline. A year later, Muse has successfully addressed several of the key issues that were holding them back from their innovation efforts and they continue to push boundaries to improve their culture and innovate new offerings.