10 tips to make you more agile innovators
The pace of change is accelerating: your consumers are demanding more integrated experiences (product, service, communication); retailers are facing disruption as are many traditional categories and your management team want you to be more creative and cycle through ideas quickly.
Pace, agility and teamwork are necessary for success.
Here are ten practical tips for corporate innovators to help you be more responsive and build novel ideas with pace and momentum.
1 AGILE TEAMS
Innovation by committee doesn’t work. Set up small cross-functional teams to work on projects comprising around four specialists from representative functions, e.g., marketing, sales, R&D, operations, market research. Make them accountable to a senior sponsor, who can protect them from bureaucracy and the corporate antibodies that kill nascent ideas.
2 MAKE THE TEAM RESPONSIBLE FOR LEARNING
Too often, innovation fails because people grab hold of a weak - not fully formed - idea, and run with it.
They haven’t been curious enough to ask two fundamental questions a) ‘are we solving a meaningful unmet customer need?’ b) ‘is this the best way to deliver the idea, that matches both our capability and business goals?’
If people aren’t willing to challenge and be curious, you end up launching half-baked ideas.
3 FOCUS ON SHORT LEARNING SPRINTS
Make people accountable for short learning sprints. Ask ‘what do you intend to learn over the next 30-60 days, and what will you do with your findings?’
The forces momentum, pace and at the same time curiosity.
A focus on learning sprints gets to stronger ideas, quicker.
4 CONCRETE IDEAS HELP YOU THINK
If a team spends too much time strategizing and creating powerpoint presentations for internal meetings, they are not focusing enough on breakthrough ideas. Challenge them: ‘show me a prototype of the idea, and tell me what you’ve learnt.’
Don’t waste time building the perfect prototype. It won’t survive the first contact with consumers and your management team. They’ll pick it apart - which is the aim.
The purpose of a prototype to explore assumptions - ‘have we nailed the insight and customer need?’, and ‘is this the best way to solve that?’
6 ANY TYPE OF IDEA CAN BE PROTOTYPED
A prototype can be a storyboard, a cardboard mockup, an animation, role-play of customer experience or simple wire-frame layout of a digital user experience. If you are working on a new business process - map it out using post-it notes. A good prototype is a minimum ‘good enough’ representation of your idea that allows people to engage with it and importantly, critique it.
A prototype enables you to share rough ideas, which is essential for learning. Too frequently, people waste time polishing their concept for internal presentations (inward-looking) and not enough time being curious (outward-looking).
Prototyping keeps you flexible, nimble, and responsive to new insights and ideas as they arise and enables people to assess the merits of how your solution is solving a user's need.
7 DITCH THE POWERPOINT
Need we say more! It crushes ideas, is a buzz kill and slows you down. People spend too much time in corporations finessing powerpoint presentations. Share your prototypes to engage your audience on the merits of your idea.
8 INVOLVE YOUR CONSUMERS IN YOUR LEARNING SPRINTS
Cycle through ideas quickly with your consumers: co-create and co-design with and alongside them. The traditional sequential approach of insight gathering-ideation-idea screening via focus groups is not conducive to agility. Best in class agile innovators cycle through a series of prototypes quickly with their consumers.
9 WORK AS A TEAM
A successful innovation team is like a winning rugby team. Each team member has a specialist role, but they have to improvise at times, be versatile; and they only win as the team.
Your small cross-functional team should work as one unit yet be flexible. The R&D specialist should be spending time with consumers and be curious about insight as it might spark technical ideas. Likewise, your marketing folks and agency partners should have a deep-seated understanding of the technology and how it works to position the concept successfully. The clash of expertise and perspectives promotes breakthrough ideas.
10 QUICK WINS
Have a balance of tinkerers, thinkers, and pragmatists who translate ideas into practical outcomes. Find a way to pilot ideas sooner rather than later. Spin-off quick wins (claims, marketing ideas, experiments with friendly retailers and stakeholders). For example, digital channels allow you to pressure test ideas in low-risk ways. This approach builds your credibility, confidence - and importantly - you learn from the experience and become more agile.
Implement the quick wins. You learn faster that way.