Note: I started this work while I was at IBM and divested to Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions as we recognized the often unrecognized to involve users and clients, as well as a broad range of internal stakeholders, in innovation and experience design processes.

Isn’t innovation just a buzzword?

Innovation is valuable novelty realized through execution. In other words, value, execution, and novelty are each necessary conditions for innovation. Value differentiates innovation from invention, execution separates innovation from mere ideas, and novelty distinguishes innovation from best practices. In spite of its recent popularity as a buzzword, few organizations have combined the insights, resources, and processes necessary to utilize innovation as a sustainable competitive advantage. This manifests itself in many ways: unforeseen substitutes creating serious disruption, the promise of future technology unrealized, and organizational silos often create internal competition rather than healthy conflicts and collaboration. This article aims to provide a brief, yet comprehensive plan for creating innovation quickly.

To facilitate innovation, organizations must understand market needs, invest in people and processes for creating novel approaches to meeting those needs, systematically analyze the value of those approaches, and refine approaches, products, services, etc., to maximize value.

In my observations from working within and with more than 25 Fortune 500 companies, the three most commonly encountered enemies of innovation are arrogance, isolation, and uncertainty.

Unfortunately, arrogance, isolation, and uncertainty often negatively impact culture, process, and analysis in the following ways:

1. Arrogance

Culture: Hubris — The otherwise unsupported belief that one’s organization is already innovative and insightful, without a clear vision, crisp strategy, formal plan, systematic process, and/or success criteria for innovation. Presents as the beliefs that “we know what customers want” and/or “customers don’t know what they want” without understanding what users and clients want to accomplish (Thanks, Anthony Ulwick!). Reversal: Field research.
Process: Inflexibility — Innovation requires many ideas, most of which will fail. Innovation also necessitates open-mindedness regarding one’s competitors, substitute products and services, etc. Reversal: Iterative, parallel design process.
Analysis: Committees — Characterized by a decision-making process that is not systematic and lacks a clear owner. Often presented as a group of people in a room who believes it is possible to innovate through meetings without healthy conflict, research, iteration, and/or deep analysis of what users and client to accomplish or any representation of the voice of the customer. Reversal: Usability testing.

2. Isolation

Culture: Assumptions — Innovation necessitates a beginner’s mind (Thanks, Shunryu SUZUKI) that questions constraints, existing approaches, industry best practices, etc. Reversal: Deep Strategy Analysis (not just a list based on Michael Porter’s Five Forces).
Process: Segregation — Innovation is considered separately from “our real products or services” and/or involves a team that is disconnected from clients and end users. Reversal: Design Charrettes (quick sessions involving feedback, sketches, ideas, experience maps, etc., and a wide range of stakeholders)
Analysis: Anecdotes — A story may captivate an audience or help during the design process, but should never define success or value. Appropriate research methods, measurements, and analyses are critical to understanding significance and value. Reversal: Embedded Metrics.

3. Uncertainty

Culture: Ambiguity — Innovation is extremely difficult without internal clarity resonating throughout an organization. Reversal: Overcommunicating mission, strategy, and culture.
Process: Perfectionism — Failing early and failing often optimizes return on investment by reducing costs. Waiting for the perfect solution before prototyping and testing reduces the likelihood of novelty. Reversal: Prototyping and formative testing.
Analysis: Confounds — The return on investments in innovation is never truly measured, since interventions are neither properly defined, nor systematically analyzed using experimental or quasi-experimental methods. Reversal: Quasi-experimental designs.

Fortunately, neutralizing the three enemies of innovation is simple with a systematic, comprehensive approach that properly combines understanding, observation, valuation, conceptualization, validation, iteration, and implementation.

Enabling innovation through a clear, resonant, healthy organizational culture (even in a huge organization with traditional processes)

Borrowing from two famous quotations, innovation favors the bold — and the prepared.

o Identify the executive owner of innovation

o Create a cohesive, interdisciplinary ‘board of innovation’ to provide high-level direction and resources.

o Include 4–8 other stakeholders (e.g., users and clients)

o Benchmark your current experience against leaders and competition.

o Align innovation metrics and business metrics using a balanced scorecard approach

o Create an innovation strategy that is clear and actionable.
Notes about strategy: Strategy is systematic, inclusive, and, perhaps most importantly, exclusive. Strategic analysis is not a daily thing like execution, management, and measurement. Strategy is not a collection of lists, a vision, or a plan. Strategy is both qualitative and quantitative.

o Overcommunicate strategy, mission, and commitment throughout your organization.

o Empower innovation resources.

o Identify and empower an innovation team

Minimally, four skills are necessary: research, design, business analysis, and prototyping.

o Communicate your innovation mission, strategy, and plan internally

o Create a broad internal process for gathering insights such as an innovation jam (e.g., through Yammer)

o Enable lab and field experimentation.

o Create lab testing environments and processes that enable rapid validation and user testing

o Create field testing environments — preferably locations near corporate headquarters with otherwise superior service to ensure satisfied customers even when concepts, POCs, and pilots fail. (This is even easier on the web.)

Facilitating innovation through people, processes, and analyses

The following process for innovation can be completed comfortably in 2–3 month cycles by a small team with 2 week checkpoints and iteration. Reducing the time between research and conceptualization is critical, as user and client insights are like dairy products — consumed fresh and in small quantities (thanks, Jan Chipchase!). Also, requiring designers and developers to participate in field research will likely increase empathy and invigorate creativity.

o Framing
o Establish Biannual Innovation Workshop (Offsite) with action research elements, strategy and plan evaluation and updates, etc.

o Understanding | Observation
o Incorporate ethnography into research processes: field research fuels innovation

o Desired Outcomes focus groups with End Users

o Preliminary IP Evaluation

Conceptualization | Validation Phase
o Planning workshops
- Create rapid business cases focused on both revenue and cost benefits
- Decide which ideas should be included during this iteration
- Formative Test Plan — Establish appropriate measures, variables, controls, participants, etc.

o First iteration
- Design Charrettes — Broad participation to generate and synthesize ideas
- Conceptualization — Sketches, wireframes, low fidelity prototypes
- Validation — Focus groups, user testing, walkthroughs, etc.

o Second iteration
- Conceptualization | Refinement — Low/medium fidelity prototypes
- Validation — Focus groups, user testing, walkthroughs, etc.

o Third iteration
- Conceptualization | Refinement — Low/medium fidelity prototypes
- Validation — Focus groups, user testing, walkthroughs, etc.

Formal Innovation Evaluations
- Executive Evaluation — POC, pilot, refine, or reject
- Documentation — Failures, successes, experiments, procedures, solutions, etc.
- Intellectual Property (IP) Evaluation — patents, publications, etc.

Implementation Interlock with Champions, Stakeholders, etc.
- Create objectives, requirements, specifications, etc., for implementation teams
- Define quantitative and qualitative analyses during POC, pilot, and beyond using embedded metrics, quasi-experimental designs, etc. o Iterative participatory design
- Review feedback from users, clients, and other stakeholders
- Review relevant business metrics
- Communicate internally and externally regarding innovation

Guiding Innovation

When adapting the formal process described above to your own innovation aspirations and strategy, consider the following guiding principles throughout:

Questioning — users, suppliers, analysts, assumptions, constraints, SMEs from other fields, etc.
Capturing — meetings, ideas, user challenges, testimonials, criticisms, etc.
Sharing — internally, externally, meeting notes, prior art, value analyses, anecdotes, data
Exploring — your organization, competitors, potential substitutes
Evaluating — ideas, inventions, innovations, best practices
Creating — sketches, maps, concepts, metrics, prototypes, test protocols
Experimenting — lab, proof of concept, pilot, deployments
Analyzing — qualitative, quantitative, business value
Refining — design is the details; no idea is perfect.

Note: These ideas didn’t just come to me ex nihilo; special thanks to users I had the pleasure of observing and clients we had the pleasure of partnering with, as well as many of my colleagues at IBM and Toshiba.