By Connie Harryman, Applied Concepts Creativity
Guest Blogger IIR USA
LIVE Front End of Innovation Europe 2010
Topic:
Idea: A Framework for Driving Innovation Throughout Your Organization
Speaker:
Daryl Dunbar: SVP of Innovation, REED ELSEVIER
Daryl Dunbar built out an innovation team and created an IDEA methodology. His background includes experiences at British Telecom.
IDEA means: Inspire, Discover, Evaluate, and Act.
We need a common language. Innovation is about ideas that result in value creation. Value may not always be about economics. Value occurs at the intersection of capability, viability, and desirability.
Innovation can be of different types:
1.) Products/services
2.) Process
3.) Business models
4.) Management practices
Innovation comes in degrees:
1.) Sustain and grow.
2.) Build new revenue streams.
3.) Build new business.
4.) Creating strategic alternatives.
IDEA Framework was developed, not as a process, not as a procedure nor as a workshop. It is a loose framework.
There are 4 modules:
1.) From infinite possibilities to finite action.
2.) Need to frame the challenge.
3.) Pick your leaping off point
4.) Set boundaries, set goals.
Think about what you are trying to achieve. Assemble many different types of stimulus such as stakeholder interviews. In a cross-functional sharing session, you can ask 'What are we doing now'?
Obtain agreement on the type of stimulus to be used. How can you inspire people to innovate, to think differently, and to engage the world in a different way.
For example he used IDEA to develop these customer propositions.
' Inspire: uncover themes, pain points, what people doing, follow customers around, themes generate trends, then pull out insights.
' Discover: divergent thinking wide leads to convergent thinking, develop blue print and road map, and see what execution could looks like.
' Evaluate: engage customers, get compelling business case, understanding of where it fits and how use it.
' Act: Launch a pilot. Oftentimes what happens in organizations is that there are plenty of ideation sessions, and then the ideas are cataloged, rolled up, and stuck in a cabinet and forgotten. You need to act on it.
Target 100 logged ideas. Combine ideas and stretch them, look at trends and themes and build things out to draw out large opportunities.
When you evaluate, build compelling propositions and business cases. It is very important to engage with customers and potential partners at this time.
Then Act to pilot, refine, and launch successful propositions. Be careful with measurement systems because you will get the behavior you incent. Stay away from ROI, it kills innovation. A payback in 12 months is unrealistic. Do a pain-gain matrix and consider the value of the opportunity to the degree of difficulty to execute. Create an opportunity map with timeframes labeled 3-5 years in the future.