Innovation is one of the key drivers of growth and sustainability in the industry today. Why? Companies acknowledged that in today's demanding global markets, productivity and world-class operating success alone are not enough to produce a sustainable competitive advantage.
Innovation is clearly highly dependent on organizational culture and the individuals involved. Yet imagination is also a mechanism that can be strengthened.
Improving innovation starts with a strategy. The innovation strategy should address culture, processes, and enabling technology in a holistic way.
We will start our innovation journey with a Strategic Foresight Exercise.
Check the video below to know what Strategic Foresight is:
Megatrends and Innovation
Frederic De Meyer offers a unique insight into how global changes translate into new business opportunities.
Please revise the presentation below to support your megatrends research and analysis.
Assessing the impact of megatrends on your company from Frederic De Meyer
FORESIGHT & MEGATRENDS
The consciousness of how megatrends can influence your innovation project is an important first step. While it can take the input of outside people to unleash this information, or to help you perform diligent thinking in selecting and spotting trends, what will eventually come out of it depends on this foresight task.
Assignment Guidelines
Basically, there are four steps in the process:
1. Please go through the resources below to get acquainted with current megatrends.
2. Select trends to include.
3. Discuss trends internally in ?think tank? meetings with your colleagues or friends.
4. Build conclusions and recommendations for your future memory (From > To synthesis).
FINDING INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES
Entrepreneurial Mindset
An entrepreneurial mindset is a set of skills that enable people to identify and make the most of opportunities, overcome and learn from setbacks, and succeed in a variety of settings.
3 Horizon Framework
Thinking about the future involves learning to think otherwise. Emerging change will challenge our existing beliefs and the actions, strategies, and products of today will become outdated over time. How can our thinking and planning be forward-looking? The Three Horizons Framework (3H) helps by first asking people to make their assumptions explicit and then to discuss evolving changes as a way to reconsider their innovation options.
Drucker?s Seven Sources for Innovative Opportunities
Drucker identifies seven sources of innovative opportunities which those interested in starting an entrepreneurial venture should be monitoring.
Finding Innovation Opportunities Challenge
Industry-changing innovations can seem to come out of nowhere.
You can actually see the early warning signals that show when significant changes are needed.
Then you can combine different building blocks to pursue breakthrough innovations.
Assignment Guidelines
Please follow the following steps in the process:
1. Perform a 3 Horizon framework scan for the sharing economy.
2. Pick an horizon of your choice and select the building blocks from the 10 types of innovation article bellow that you consider more relevant to the innovation process.
Research and Discovery: Secondary Research
A research approach requiring the use of existing data is secondary research or desk research. Current data are summarised and collated to improve overall research effectiveness. For the present challenge we will look at three things:
- Existing products - looking at existing products and services, their concepts, interactions and experiences. It includes the internal organisation, the competition, partners or independently developing ideas. It can be incredibly specific or wildly generic ? matching your scope.
- Current knowledge - deep diving into your own topic. Search for reports and spend some time understanding customer data, iterations, flow diagrams, industry presentations. Explore the authors of those files, you might understand more about your own project than you did before.
- Previous research - Make use of that vast knowledge base and check whether your topic was already considered. This will inform your design direction and help you find an additional argument.
Support Materials:
Research & Discovery
After analysing the megatrends, the 3 horizons framework, and the building blocks of innovation you have a pretty good vision of the big picture around your topic. At this stage start by identifying your learning goals, early hypotheses, and assumptions. The research & discovery process will create corresponding research protocols that contain all the steps necessary for carrying out the research operation.
Guidelines
Please follow the three steps in the process:
1. Identify what you know already about the challenge
2. List what you don't know or you would you like to know more about the challenge.
3. Define your research objectives and research protocol
Define the Challenge and Empathy
Design Thinking Process Overview
Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.
Empathy
Empathy is at the heart of Design. Technology is a meaningless activity without the awareness of what others see, feel, and experience. If shown as it is in this video, compassion can be truly inspiring. The real scale and scope of the difficulty of understanding a complicated social circumstance in order to build a structure that helps many and differs is what the following video shows us.
design-thinking-getting-started-with-empathy
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09544820902875033
Design Challenge
Having the right context for your design challenge will get you started on the right foot, organize how you think about your solution, and help explain where you can take your project at moments of uncertainty. Framing the design challenge is more about art than about science, but there are a couple of important items to note. Go through the different resources to know more about how to formulate a good design challenge.
how-to-properly-frame-your-design-challenge-36104910dfc8
file:///Users/Gui/Downloads/60.html
Qualitative Research Techniques
After performing trend analysis, benchmark, and quantitative data collection its time to address qualitative research techniques. The goal is not to observe with a judgemental mindset, but to engage in the flow of action and try to be surprised. We are observing not with a validation hat but with the explorer hat! Please check the resources bellow to explore the different tools and techniques.
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dschool_bootleg_deck_2018_final_sm+%282%29.pdf
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Opportunity Spaces
How Might We Questions
At this stage, we want to synthesise all the previous research into specific opportunity spaces. One big design challenge needs to break down in smaller dimensions where we can actually create value and increase the chance of disruptive innovation.
Creative Confidence and Brainstorming
Brainstorming is the first step in the discovery process of a new project so being accessible to all ideas and possibilities is crucial. Problems come when team members filter out the positive ideas. Bear in mind that we value quantity over quality.
Please check in this tool to help you capture your f2f or virtual brainstorm:
Download
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https://youtu.be/_UmKGSMUlUA
https://youtu.be/VvdJzeO9yN8
Storyboard
You can use Storyboards once you know the problem you?re trying to solve and for whom. Instead, you use Storyboards to create a low-fidelity narrative that focuses on people and their actions, thoughts, goals, emotions, and relationships.
https://youtu.be/JMjozqJS44M
Develop Experiments
The goal is to build a customer experience that feels as genuine as possible, so that the team can obtain the most valuable data from the experiments while remaining small and responsive to the investment.
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design-and-agile-from-idea-to-pilot-in-three-phases
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https://youtu.be/Q4MzT2MEDHA