Ideas come when you're relaxed

"Ideas come when you're relaxed."His colleagues are sparkly young creatures. There is not a suit in sight, no one looks much over 30, and everyone looks almost unnaturally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, perhaps due to the visits of the psychic healer subsidised by the company who drops in every Wednesday morning. Pat's skill was discretion: she kept her distance as I ambled from rail to rail, shuffling through leopard skin silk shirts at pounds 400 a throw.After: Pat Roper, 60, has been a shop assistant for 44 years, and completed a two-year sales training "It isn't in my personality to be pushy," she says. "What we try to do is give companies real innovation, not just catch-up innovation," explains Kingdon "We only focus on one thing: real step-jump change. We tell people how to be new and different - but different in a way that fits strategically with what their company does, not different just for difference's sake." The ?What If! client list includes Guinness, Heinz, KFC/Pizza Hut, PepsiCo, United Biscuits, Tesco and Unilever, along with other household names who have demanded a pledge of confidentiality; they have variously hailed the company as refreshing, energetic, exciting, and even fun. It's obvious, on stepping through the doors of the offices in Primrose Hill, north-west London, a stone's throw from Oasis's recording studio, that ?What If! is an unusual place to work.

For the modern innovations business is a million miles from the wild- haired Heath Robinson-type boffin toiling in his garden shed. He and his staff are the modern-day equivalent of the old-fashioned inventor, though they work with computers and flip-charts rather than screwdrivers or test-tubes. Inventiveness still has its place, but it has to be tempered with shrewd business sense. ?What If!, the company he co-founded four years ago, is a unique firm specialising in product innovation.

Next stop for her campaign are the chic fish restaurants of Fisherman's Wharf where she plans to put an end to the practice of boiling lobster and crab alive. Matthew Kingdon's business card gives his profession as "explorer", but rather than trackless jungle and tundra, he travels the nebulous world of concepts and ideas. Says Ms Briggs: "The time of crustaceans is coming." They didn't name this city after St Francis for nothing.. The big question exercising the residents of Russian Hill and Pacific Heights is: is it still OK to eat sushi? Regarded as the perfect food by the semi-veg inhabitants of SF sushi is even bigger here than in New York.

But suddenly ordering the execution of so much marine life at lunchtime puts fretting over line-caught tuna into perspective.Patricia Briggs has worse news for them. " But let's not get them on to that," I hear her mutter.The Chinese logic in selling live fish is simple You know how long it has been dead. The rest of the city's non-partisan population just want to do the right thing. The big fish wasn't going without a fight Three strikes and it still wasn't out. The fishmonger continued to smack it across the head with a rough wooden baton, which he kept for this purpose.