Innovating in the social space

By Robin Low

INTRODUCTION NEW

METHODS, IDEAS OR

PRODUCTS

PART 1

Innovation

• Innovation does not mean only IT solutions

– Unnecessary tech is simply a waste of money

• Innovation starts from within, corporate

culture needs to support innovation.

• Innovation comes in big and small, there is

change to small.

• When you innovate, change will happen,

change needs to be managed.

Barriers to Innovation

FEAR1) Fear of failing and uncertainty.

– When it has not be done before, there is much fear that it will not succeed, and often cause organizational paralysis

2) Fear of looking stupid.

– Many executives don’t like to learn new skills, egos are at stake and they don’t want to look like amateurs.

Barriers to Innovation

EXPERIENCE3) Knowledge can be a crutch.

– Knowing too much of a subject may cause

executives not to take in new ideas and reject

facts contrary to their experience.

4) Outdated knowledge.

– Many executives graduated years ago and their

idea of technology is often outdated and they do

not take the time to learn new skills.

Your Organization

• Your employees need to know your tagline

and mission statement. Executive should

demonstrate it, and it should be part of

corporate culture.

• Motivation is key for innovation, employees

need to feel ownership and they are

empowered to make a difference

Don’t chase perfection

• Creating something revolutionary is never

perfect.

• Don’t wait, there is no perfect time to try and

launch.

• Don’t worry about working on a new process

or product.

• Remember, the first laser printer is crap, but it

is a revolutionary crap.

Haters will hate

• There will always be people that will hate any

sort of change, whether it is good or bad.

• All products and services will polarize people.

• Remember, there will also be a subset of

people that will love the product.

Communicate well

• For every innovation, you need to sell it. The

leader needs to share the thoughts behind the

innovation and communicate the benefits and

values.

• Use the 10-20-30 rule: create 10 slides for a

20-minute presentation, and use 30-point

font.

• Tailor presentation to audience.

Think beyond norms spark innovation

• Use design thinking?

• Combining mundane methods together may

create a new solution.

• In a share economy, don’t think of innovating

alone.

PART 2

Design thinking

Experience of Design Thinking

Innovation is tied to empathy

• Empathy is the foundation to Design thinking

as well

• Lived experience of the end user (or

beneficiary) is key.

Empathy Fail

Empathy

Fail

A bad system will defeat a

good person every time

-- Edwards Demming

Empathy

What is Empathy?

Empathizing means getting out of the office and

interacting with beneficiaries or end users, living

in their shoes, before you design the programs,

and throughout the process to make sure you

are on the right track.

Tools of Empathy

• Interviews

• Observation / immersion

�You are not looking for what they think they want

– you are looking for what they need, based on

what they do

• Engaging in the program as an end user

• Free yourself from expectations and

assumptions.

• Do careful recordings.

Define

• Define the design challenge, what is the

problem that we are trying to solve?

Steps to define

• Collect impression /

images

• Pay attention to

emotions,

motivations and

context

• Post

• Clutter

• Notice Patterns

• Identify themes

• Notice

contradictions

• Discuss

• Draft

Evaluate design challenge

Further it

• Broad enough to discover unexpected

value

• Narrow enough to be managable

Ideate

• Use various ideation techniques

1. Questioning assumptions

2. Opportunity redefinition

3. Wishing

4. Triggered brainwalking

5. Semantic intuition

6. Picture prompts

7. Worst ideahttp://www.innovationmanagement.se/2013/05/30/the-7-all-time-greatest-ideation-techniques/

Prototype

How to prototype

• Create a MVP (Minimal Viable product)

• This can be a

– Storyboard

– Roleplay

– Rough Model

– 3D printing / laser cutting / making

– Brainstorming

�Prototyping is to think, learn and build quickly.

Test

• Involve end user or beneficiaries to try the

prototype.

• Pivot

• (Revise if needed)

However…

While these key steps have proven that it can deliver

creativity to organization by providing qualitative

value in innovation, it’s strength becomes its

weakness because these steps are insufficient and

unconnected to the reality. Therefore, innovation

cannot happen until and unless there is an equal

input from Business Thinking

http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2013/02/25/why-design-thinking-will-fail/

Flaws in design thinking?

• Design consultancies that promoted Design

Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process

trick would produce significant cultural and

organizational change.

• In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted

that mess along with the process and real

innovation took place. In most others, it did not.

• Design thinking assumes that your beneficiaries

CANNOT solve problems on their own, and you

are NEEDED to solve it for them.

PART 3

Innovation is only made by

motivated people

Inducing Innovation

• Working climate must be forgiving and

understanding

• Working environment and hierarchy must

allow mistakes and failures to happen and

learn from them, rather than penalize teams

and employees who make them.

Understand

• Innovation can be driven from a true understanding of the problem or need.

• You need a team with good knowledge of the beneficiary or customer or users of the product or service to define and develop solutions that the innovation concerns.

• Beneficiaries are often capable to come up with good solutions. Get them involved to solve their problems, so they OWN the solution. CROWDSOURCE

True Innovation

• True innovation bring value to the receiver

and provider of the solution. It’s a win-win

relationship, resulting in a long term

sustainable relationship rather than a

transaction.

• True innovation will not happen the first time,

and will get better with iterations.

Learn

• Learn from failures instead of sweeping it

under the carpet.

• Sometimes trying something, knowing it will

fail may yield unexpected learning outcomes.

• Knowing and going through failures make

solutions more sustainable with

improvements and variations.

Consequence

• Innovation is often a consequence of positive

culture, behavior and positive working

environment.

PART 4

Ask the Right Questions

Positive Mindset

• Think positive, everything is possible.

• Instead of asking, “Can a handicapped person

drive?”, framing the question differently can

be empowering to think deeper, ask, “How

can a handicapped person drive?”

• Changing from “Can” to “How Can” questions

the premise instead of the person.

Focus

• Have clear objectives you want to achieve.

• It is good to have some small innovation to

boost confidence, but focus on things that

make the biggest difference or achieve

greatest impact.

• Don’t focus on activity. Raise level of

ambition.

New Blood

• Innovation can come from new hires as well.

• Instead of looking for people with the

excellent qualifications, finding the right

candidate with the right attitude and having a

good induction program may be cheaper too.

• Forget probation and training, have a good

support system to ensure they don’t fail.

• Personalize support, focus on people’s

strength, and give them what they need.

New Blood

• Start referrals. Get employees/volunteers to

bring friend/consultants to support activities.

Get funding and pay fairly. Leveraging on

relationships, you may find great people.

Some of them may donate money too!

• Use technology and social tools to engage new

hires and volunteers. Make it fun.

• Think about the team. When a new person

joins the team, dynamics change and broaden

focus on the team to support as well.

PART 5

Leading Innovation

• While senior executives cite innovation as an important driver of growth, few of them explicitly lead and manage it.

• As with any top-down initiative, KPI driven executives chase short term goals. Innovation is inherently associated with change and takes attention and resources away from achieving those goals.

• Executives pay lip service to innovation but doing nothing about it, inhibiting it.

Other Inhibitors

• The failure of executives to model

innovation—encouraging behavior, such as

risk taking and openness to new ideas, places

second.

• Rewarding nothing but short-term

performance and maintaining a fear of failure

also make it to the top of the list of inhibitors.

How to Advance Innovation?

• Define the kind of innovation that drives growth and helps meet strategic objectives.

– When senior executives ask for substantial innovation in the gathering of consumer insights, the delivery of services, or the customer experience, for example, they communicate to employees the type of innovation they expect. In the absence of such direction, employees will come back with incremental and often familiar ideas.

How to Advance Innovation?

• Add innovation to the formal agenda at

regular leadership meetings.

– This approach sends an important signal to

employees about the value management attaches

to innovation.

How to Advance Innovation?

• Set performance metrics and targets for innovation.– Leaders should think about two types of metrics: the

financial and the behavioral. • What metrics would have the greatest effect on how people

work? How new innovation could save current cost by 20% within 3 years.

• Another established targets for potential fundraising from new ideas in order to ensure that they would be substantial enough to affect its performance. Leaders can also set metrics to change ingrained behavior, such as the “not invented here” syndrome, by requiring 25 percent of all ideas to come from external sources.

Innovation Network

• Since new ideas seem to spur more new ideas,

networks generate a cycle of innovation.

• Furthermore, effective networks allow people

with different kinds of knowledge and ways of

tackling problems to cross-fertilize ideas.

• By focusing on getting the most from innovation

networks, leaders can therefore capture more

value from existing resources, without launching

a large-scale change-management program.

Innovation Network

• Middle managers generally are the ones with the

most negative attitude toward innovation and

were also the most highly sought after for advice

about it.

• They served as bottlenecks to the flow of new

ideas and the open sharing of knowledge.

• Either get a network of middle managers to

generate bigger and newer ideas or connect

senior management to the innovation network.

Innovation Network

What Inhibits Innovation

Building Trust

• The cultural attributes that inhibit innovation:

a bureaucratic, hierarchical, and fearful

environment.

• Corporate-wide change programs not only are

daunting and time consuming but also often

have only a limited impact.

• Top teams can help build a more innovative

culture.

Building Trust

• Embrace innovation as a top team.

– It’s not enough for the CEO to make innovation a

personal goal and to attend meetings on

innovation regularly. Members of the top team

must agree that promoting it is a core part of the

company’s strategy, reflect on the way their own

behavior reinforces or inhibits it, and decide how

they should role-model the change and engage

middle management.

Building Trust

• Turn selected managers into innovation

leaders.

– Identify managers who already act, to some

degree, as network brokers and improve their

coaching and facilitation skills so that they can

build the capabilities of other people involved in

innovation efforts more effectively. The goal:

making networks more productive.

Building Trust

• Create opportunities for managed

experimentation and quick success.

– This approach is the best way to start any change

effort in large organizations.

– Quick success matters even more with innovation:

people need to see results and to participate in

the change.

– To get going quickly and learn along the way,

select an innovation theme or topic area and then

create small project teams.

Building Trust

• Create opportunities for managed experimentation and quick success.

– While you try out topics and ideas, test the most effective leadership and organizational approaches for your organization.

– The goal isn’t to get it right the first time but to move quickly to give as many influential employees as possible a positive experience of innovation, even if a project doesn’t generate profits immediately.

– A positive experience will make all the difference in building the organization’s capabilities and confidence.

Final Words

• Innovation is a big idea with big potential.

• Be sure to prototype it and work in small

steps, implementing one or few ideas and

grow the team.

• Be sure to create value and have fun!

For more information join in the conversation at

https://www.facebook.com/socialhub