Case Study: Facilitating innovation
A product team had been challenged to come up with some truly innovative ideas for a Personal Loan product. The Product Manager asked me to plan and facilitate an innovation day which would enable the team to think outside the box.
The first step was to ensure that the venue was ‘off-site’ in an environment that would not trigger business-as-usual thinking patterns. I asked the team members what techniques they had used before for creative thinking and developed the whole day around methods that were new to all of them. The final programme involved varied and occasionally shocking techniques such as Reversal, Provocation, Random Input and Concept Fans. Between the innovation exercises I ran warm-up, team building, conflict and trust exercises to ensure the team were really Performing.
By 5pm the team was completely exhausted but very pleased with themselves. They had come up with many flipcharts’ worth of ideas that they had never thought of before.
Ensuring your business is sustainable is much more than being careful about the resources you use. You need to consider if all your processes and systems will work in the real world, with real-world competition, real-world resource constraints and of course real people inventing, manufacturing, delivering and buying your products and services.