Innovation Journey: Sow the Seed
Innovation is always an exciting but mysterious term. It implies both “fun” and “growth” — some of the best elements in a job. I have started the discovery journey of innovation without much prior knowledge. Throughout this discovery journey, I submerged myself in a series of innovation practitioners’ sharing through literature, books, blog posts, podcasts, white papers, and online classes. These are some of the biggest key takeaways:
#1 Innovation is multifaceted, starts with diagnosis
In understanding what really is innovation, I learned that there is no single business area that defines innovation. While many companies focus on products and services innovation, we can apply innovation to a wide range of business areas, including business model, culture, and process. For example, innovation scientist Larry Keeley suggests ten different areas companies can innovate, innovation consultancy Innosight emphasizes the importance of creating an innovation culture to drive everyday innovation from employees. One message consistent is first to assess the context and understand the innovation goals before anchoring a specific business area.
#2 Four types of innovations, diversification is key
While innovation manifests itself across different business areas, the industry categorized innovation into four types of innovations: 1. Incremental Innovation refers to a continuous improvement of the existing product and service to provide more value to an existing market. 2. Architectural/ Sustaining Innovation refers to modifying an existing solution to an entirely new market. 3. Disruptive Innovation, introduced by Clayton Christensen, refers to creating new technologies and products to serve an existing market. 4. Radical Innovation refers to the application of new solutions to a new market. With different types of innovation approaches, the key is to explore different approaches to maintain a portfolio of initiatives and ideas.
#3 Innovation is a means to the end
Innovation, at its core, is about solving problems. When it comes to solving problems, a few innovation design frameworks are important to understand.
Design Thinking is a human-centered design process for us to learn more about the users, challenge the underlying assumptions, and redefine problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions. In this iterative process, it starts emphasizing with the users through a series of ideation and prototype steps. It ends with testing the idea with the users to understand the feasibility.
Reference: Design Thinking: How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb
Design Sprint is a methodology that brings the Design Thinking framework to life with a 5-day process to tackle design problems. I have personally read the book and find it a compressive and practical guide to creating a sprint workshop. Based on this approach, a team will come together to explore solutions for a problem. The entire process entails five days a week with minimum interruptions.
- On Monday, the team will map out the problem with a journey and pick a target to focus on using techniques such as “How Might We.”
- On Tuesday, the team will sketch competing solutions on paper through techniques such as Show and Tell.
- On Wednesday, the team will decide the final idea to proceed with techniques such as speed critique and note-and-vote.
- On Thursday, the team will hammer out a prototype with tools such as Keynote or PowerPoint and create an interview script for the customers on Friday.
- On Friday, the team will be assigned various roles to test the prototype with real customers.
Given the rise of popular tools such as Lean Startup and Agile, Gartner decided to combine Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile in one diagram in an attempt to bridge the different tools together. One important takeaway is to start with customers’ pain points and builds with an iterative and experimental approach.
Designing solutions is a non-linear process, and Double Diamond illustrates when to deploy divergent thinking and convergent thinking. The framework starts with exploring an issue by discovering the problem and defining the challenge. The second diamond encourages teams to develop different solutions to a clearly defined problem and it testing them. It eventually ends with delivery.
To wrap up, innovation ultimately aims to help companies across various industries drive future growth by solving customers’ problems. Change in today’s digital era is the new norm, and innovation is the process that helps us to navigate and adapt. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” and knowing the basic frameworks and approaches for innovation is the first step.
