“We’re in the idea business,” said Skip Carney, the owner of Carney & Co.

The agency’s new tagline is: “Bold ideas for growing companies.”

“It’s not just about being creative,” Carney said. “It’s not just about having some neat ideas. It’s having bold, innovative ideas for companies that want to grow.”

Under the process, Carney’s clients sit down in a conference office and go through a creative problem-solving process that has been developed by Min Basadur, who is the founder of the Center for Research in Applied Creativity and who previously worked in product development for Proctor & Gamble. Carney and others in his office traveled to Canada for extensive training in the system from Basadur, who is professor emeritus of innovation in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.

The visoneering process, Carney said, involves sitting down with a client and developing a creative problem-solving profile known as “The Basadur Simplex.”

“It’s all about seeing the future,” Carney said. “We help (clients) develop innovative solutions to their problems.”

Ideas generated are outside the box, he said.

“Big means, ‘bold, innovation and great,’” he said. “Don’t think good, think great, because to lead and to grow and to really prosper, you need to be innovative and you need to think great.”

His office in Rocky Mount has been spruced up to reflect his evolving business, with a wall in each room recently painted a bright color.

In each room are different sayings beginning with the word “Think.” In the front of his office is a picture of the Wright brothers and their first airplane. Stretching across a hallway is a saying by Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Carney said his firm is repositioning itself.

“We’re narrowing our focus,” he said. “Being a traditional advertising agency doesn’t mean much anymore.”

He said the agency now has two core functions – strategic and tactical. Visioneering is strategic. Illumination develops the tactical steps to reach the strategic goals. Clients can hire his firm for one or both services.

Clients are more likely to buy into an advertising or marketing campaign if they have been part of the visioneering process generating the ideas, he said.