The Engine That Drives Innovation
Innovation is everywhere. There are over 50,000 books about innovation on Amazon. Hundreds of podcasts on innovation. Innovation classes at schools beginning as early as sixth grade. The vast majority of companies have innovation departments. There are a lot of people thinking about and practicing innovation, but does innovation mean the same thing in the same way to all of us? Definitely not! For this article I am going to talk about what innovation means here at ITG.
The foundational process, which is shared across many innovation frameworks, is simple: diverge then converge. Explore then decide. Every one of our projects has different starting points and different objectives, but we design them with the following concepts in mind to ensure that each individual—and every team—gets the most out of the work.
We Are Tactical – So You Can Stay Focused
Every innovation initiative is underpinned by a larger strategy. Teams want to build out a product pipeline, position a new service, or explore possibilities to reach new audiences. We meet with our clients to fully understand the strategy, then we go to work planning out the tactics necessary to achieve it in our innovation sessions. We plan out location, logistics, consumer selection, and the specific activities for every portion of the workshop to ensure they all build up to that final strategic objective.
We work with our clients to understand their objectives then we take full responsibility to guide the process and ensure that the outputs of each section move us in the direction of the final goal. This allows our clients to focus on one task at a time, using all their insight and creativity on generating ideas and language.
This focus on planning and process—so that the client team can focus on content—has been a core value at ITG since its inception in 1979.
Some things to think about when you are planning an innovation workshop:
New thinking needs new stimuli. Plan creative exercises that challenge the group to think differently as the workshop goes on. Mix up the ways in which people are interacting, the content they are producing, and the format in which content is shared.
Keep everyone comfortable. Find a space that is big enough for the people in your group to move around. If possible, provide water, coffee, and food.
Ask the participants for one thing at a time. Break up your creative exercises and ideation into distinct sections so the people generating the content can do a single task. The output will be greatly improved.
Invite people who will bring the heat. Whenever possible, invite people who will bring energy and a different perspective. People further from the content will bring new thinking and give the other participants the opportunity to show off their expertise. Who doesn’t like feeling like an expert?
We Are Flexible – So You Can Explore Productively
Working in the world of new ideas means that unpredictability is baked in. In a typical project, we diverge, or explore possibilities explicitly, at least 4 times. The goal of divergence is to find new opportunities to explore. If we are doing this correctly, we do not know what we are going to get until we get it.
We expect to pivot a few times during each workshop; our process is built around this principle and our experience has equipped us with the tools to capitalize on the unknown. A facilitator maintaining the strategic vision and expert in the process affords a high degree of flexibility to take new content and make it useful. This lets our client teams go where the content leads them, following exciting new paths.
Here are some tips for cultivating the flexibility necessary to discover new ideas:
Plan out chunks of time vs. minute by minute. Give the team time to think and talk without worrying about timing.
Trust your own process. Work on getting comfortable letting conversations flow, and topics drifting during any specific piece of the process. Monitor the conversations and content and actively plan how you are going to incorporate it into the next step.
Keep your team on task. Work with your team to keep them focused on the type of output that is in focus. If they are generating ideas, try to steer them away from building out full concepts or talking feasibility. Maintaining this focus will get you the building blocks you need for the next step even if the project starts to stray from the bullseye.
We Are Inspiring – So You Can Get Excited About the Exciting Stuff
New and exciting ideas are easier to come up with when the people generating them are inspired, excited, and feeling good. The difference between a great innovation workshop and a lackluster one can hinge on team morale.
When we think about inspiration, it is a full experience concept. Engaging activities are a must, and keeping a team fired up and creative requires more than providing the right instructions.
Looking beyond the obvious pieces of the process, clever thought experiments, creative exercises, etc., we spend a significant amount of time managing the team’s energy to keep them inspired.
Here are some tips for inspiring your team and maintaining innovation-boosting excitement:
Manage the pace of the session by moving the group along to different tasks based on the energy in the room. This lets you strike a balance between giving people time to think and preventing stagnation or boredom.
Identify people’s creative styles and strengths to help them amplify what they are already good at. Some people are excellent at generating lots of ideas quickly, while others are great at building on ideas or coming up with unique twists on things.
Bring in stimuli that pushes the boundaries, going beyond competitive products or services. We work with clients to understand the concepts that underly the innovation and strategy, then work them into the preparation assignment we have our Creative Consumers® associates bring into the ideation, the types of products we bring to the session, and even the venue itself.
We are Organized – So You Can Relax
One of the keys to exploring new ideas and finding creative solutions is to put aside the urge to assess your ideas as you generate them. It is a natural reaction to come up with or hear an idea and immediately start thinking about how it might work, or in what ways it fits with your company’s priorities and capabilities. While these are important things to consider, they can hamper the process when not addressed at the appropriate time.
When we plan out projects, each section of the process has a distinct output that feeds into the next step. During ideation the focus is on quantity and diversity of ideas because the goal is to explore a wide range of possibilities. For the participants, the experience is working on a single task at a time. We, as the facilitators, are planning out each task, compiling the output, and organizing it so that it is ready for the next step. This separation of content and process allows the team to be more free and experimental with their thinking, while we ensure efficiency throughout the process. This efficiency saves time, but it also keeps the team motivated and instills in them a sense of progress.
Thought and planning around idea capture prior to the project go a long way. The way in which you capture ideas at the beginning of the process has a big impact as you work toward your final concepts or design briefs.
Here are some tips for managing organization so your team can stay focused and inspired:
During ideation, set up a capture system that allows participants to enter ideas efficiently so they can spend more time in conversation and less time working within a platform. At ITG, we use our e-deation® platform to quickly capture ideas, produce a ballot for easy voting, and then develop concepts. The more time people can spend engaging in conversation and creative thought, the better your output will be.
Organize as you go. Those of us who have been around for a while have all had the soul-crushing experience of sitting down with a massive pile of post-it notes, charged with deciphering decidedly artistic handwriting. The ability to shift quickly from ideation to voting or sorting within your capture platform saves time and boosts morale.
Clearly communicate the type of output you want from the team at each point in the process. This will help ensure the content is ready for the next step and it will also give the team purpose and a clear goal, which helps with concentration and energy management.
We Are Pushers – So You Can Go Further and Think Differently
The goal of the innovation process is to get to new ideas for products, services, communications and to figure out which territory you are not currently covering. This is a difficult task for teams that work together consistently for a few reasons. The first being, you have probably already had this conversation a few times before. We often hear from teams that they have held multiple ideation sessions internally before coming to us. The second challenge is that teams can fall into their normal communication and behavioral patterns, which are not necessarily ideal when trying to think in new and novel ways.
In our workshops, we take on the responsibility of pushing the team into new patterns of thought and communication. We run 70+ workshops each year, which means we have extensive experience with a range of team dynamics, tricky personalities, and a good sense of the ruts a team can fall into. This allows us to redirect before the session goes down an unproductive path.
Here are some tips for pushing your team to think differently and avoid some common pitfalls:
Dispel the power dynamics (as much as possible.) At the beginning of each session, reinforce the idea that the participants are equals in the room. This will encourage the people who speak up less often to share their thoughts and for diverse perspectives to be considered with the same weight.
Keep an eye on the content and an ear on the conversations for common themes or those hackneyed ideas that always come up. Redirect with a u-turn, not a k-turn. This means you need to find something in the conversation that you can validate and use to change the course of thinking in the room vs. stopping it abruptly and telling people to find something else to talk about.
Reinforce a creative mindset that encourages people to listen for the good intent behind each idea and use their colleagues’ content to create new possibilities. At ITG we use the same useful mindset in every project: the Forness® Mindset.
As you work towards advancing your innovation efforts, remember that the underlying principles outlined above will take you further than relying solely on processes and frameworks. Focus, exploration, inspiration, excitement, stretch-thinking, and a little bit of chill are a winning recipe for new ideas every time!