The Goal.
Many organizations today aspire to establish a collaborative approach to innovation that’s effective, inclusive, and bias free. To achieve this, their teams should embrace a cross-disciplinary process that’s in sync with their development timing and resources. Through a custom facilitated approach, organizations can evolve toward a flexible, collaborative culture that unlocks everyone's potential for innovation.
Collaboration Beats Competition.
To evolve beyond internal competition, a diversely skilled cross-functional team can instead work together equitably and share the workload for research, brainstorming, and further steps needed to identify, develop and test solutions. Steering toward this path, organizations can negate power struggles and increase morale by sharing the privilege and responsibility of driving new development.
Some Strategies Limit Potential.
Benchmarking a competitor, a stakeholders personal tastes, and adding on trendy features may seem like quick wins, but these tactics distract from discovering your customers' true unmet needs. Following a competitor's successful product means you will have to wait and follow, which saturates the market along with all other brands doing this. Leaning into a stakeholders personal tastes, and trendy features from other markets can shortcut internal buy-in, but won’t uncover your unique opportunities to innovate.
I Facilitate Human Centered Innovation.
To address these needs, I customize and facilitate human centered innovation processes for organizations, including user research and testing. I aim to curate an intuitive step-based workflow for innovative people to collaborate cross-functionally. Steps like mapping user research trends, brainstorming solutions, and leveraging everyone's expertise to build and test prototypes in a mindful cadence can lead to meaningful, disruptive innovation.
Begin With a Preview…
After the preview, each initial process step is outlined for feedback and alignment with stakeholders. For an organization's pilot project, feedback loops are planned at strategic points, to review the project’s progress and adaptation of the process. Our goal here is establishing a framework for review timing, the process steps, and anticipated resources.
Assess Feedback…
After the preview, I begin outlining each step of the process to gather feedback, and align plans with an organization's stakeholders. To benefit decision-making for stakeholders, reviews are set at strategic points that enable them to see a diverse range of concepts informed by user research, unbiased value estimates, and tested prototype data. In summary, we align on where reviews should happen, the steps of the process, and the resources that we estimate will be needed.
Recruit Innovators…
Those interested may only have bandwidth to participate in certain steps like brainstorming or conducting user testing. Luckily, this is perfectly fine because this process is inclusive and flexible. For unfulfilled needs, other options can be explored with stakeholders, such as leveraging temporary outside support.
Plan Resources…
After recruiting innovators and aligning on the process’ steps and resources with stakeholders, we can acquire software, prototyping tools, and estimate budgets and timelines for each topic to be explored. Next customized decks are developed to facilitate each step, ensuring each collaborative project will run as smoothly as possible.
Customize The Workflow…
Prior to kicking off projects, each step has a deck outlining what should be accomplished, a recommended workflow, and links to a folder structure for user data and work. Secure, cloud based file storage that can be easily accessed by all stakeholders and cross-functional innovators is ideal.
…Then Facilitate Projects.
At this stage, there are motivated innovators ready to collaborate, tools, resources, and a fully aligned process including touchpoints where stakeholders can make well informed decisions. For initial projects, I would ideally facilitate each step to iron out hurdles and ensure the process and workflow is effective. In my experience, it’s best to lead by example at first, then pass the baton to others.
Long-Term Impact.
A well planned collaborative innovation process can enable organizations to focus appropriate resources toward untapped growth opportunities and pioneer new markets. The user research and testing steps reveal if a concept is worthy of further investment. Over time, this approach can lead to innovations that disrupt markets and deliver unique, impactful solutions. This elevates brand perception from a customer’s perspective, and attract top talent to the organization through reputation.