How to Run an Innovation Workshop

Hello, my name is Paul Sloane. I help organizations run innovation workshops, and by this I mean a particular brainstorm where the objective is to generate great ideas for new products or new services for your business. Very often large companies have processes for this, so this is particularly valuable in small and medium-sized companies where a really good workshop can generate some great ideas, but it works in all sizes of companies And all types of organizations. I'd like to give you some advice on how you can get the most value from your innovation workshop. You start by setting a clear objective. What do we want from the day, or however long the session is? What, what is it that we want out of this? What problem are we trying to solve? And what sort of innovation do we want? And the clearer you are here, the better. You shouldn't be too constricting But you shouldn't be vague either. And when doing this, it's useful to think about the selection criteria at the same time. So the second thing you're thinking about is what criteria will we use to choose the best ideas from the day? In other words, what does good look like for us? Typically, you'll want to find an innovation that plays to your strengths. You've got particular strengths in certain technologies or certain markets or certain routes to market, you might want an innovation that builds on that. And you might say, how are we going to select our innovation winner? We want something which will generate this sort of revenue in this sort of market, bring us new business in these areas. And what sort of things are off-limits? What sort of ideas don't we want? You might say, well, we're a business-to-business company, we don't want business-to-consumer products. We don't want to get into retail. We don't want to go into this particular kind of product or service. And those broad criteria are helpful as you go through the day. The next thing, and this is very important, is to invite the right kind of group, the right mix of people to help you generate the ideas. And I run innovation workshops for all sizes. I run corporate innovation camps with 80 or 100 people. But typically when I run these, it's between about 8 and 16, 18 people, that sort of size group. If you have too few, it's hard to get enough ammunition, enough ideas. What you want is a set of diverse backgrounds and skills— young and old, experienced, fresh into the company, technical people, marketing people, and so on. And if you can sprinkle in one or two provocative outsiders from outside the company, other areas, that can be very helpful. I ran a workshop with one client and he had a customer in the room, so, and the customer was very helpful in helping us come up with ideas and then select the most promising ideas. I would advise that you use a facilitator if you can. It's very hard for you if you're the manager to run the workshop well, to be generating ideas, selecting ideas, and managing the process. A good facilitator will manage the process. He or she will keep you on track, stop you going down blind alleys or getting into long discussions, make sure that you generate lots of ideas, give you different techniques to do that, help you select the ideas and arrive at the outcomes you want by the end of the day. So get an external person to run this if you can, I would advise. Typically you don't start by generating ideas immediately. You have some background material that's been prepared, maybe distributed before the meeting. And this might include market research, surveys, trend analysis, what's happening in the marketplace. Interviews with customers can be very, very useful. In particular, it's useful to focus on this question: what problems do customers have when they use our products or services? And also this: why do people choose not to use our products? Why isn't there a greater take-up, greater adoption? What's stopping them? And these are fruitful areas for review and discussion, and I often run a problem analysis module at the beginning where we'll use a tool like Why Why or 6 Serving Men to analyze the problem, to break it down into component parts, which can often be fruitful starting points for innovative ideas. Once you've done all— So the main part is brainstorming, and what you want to do here is you want to go for You get a lot of ideas, and initially at least, you go beyond reason. So unreasonable ideas are very useful. They're more provocative. It's always easier to tame a wild idea than to make a bland idea interesting. So you want wacky ideas, and that means that at the first stage, the divergent thinking stage, judgment has to be suspended. Nobody can say that wouldn't work, that's too expensive. You just record all the ideas. And a good facilitator will use a variety of methods in order to keep the ideas flowing. So I— my favorite methods include SCAMPER, similes, random word, pass the parcel. I will use different techniques depending upon what the challenge is. So I'll use different methods for a product innovation from, say, a process or service innovation. And these help to generate a large number of ideas. And when I say a large number, I'm talking about 100, 120 ideas would be typical in this sort of workshop. Once you've got the long list of ideas, then you need to select the very best ideas. And the way you do this is you apply some broad criteria to the long list. There are all sorts of criteria that you can use. I've got different ones that I use. One of the best for new products or new services is need, greed, succeed, and speed. Is there a customer need for this innovation? Can we make money from it? Can we make a profit? Can we actually build it? Can we crack the technology? Can we become a market leader? And how quickly can we bring this to market? So you go through and you give the ideas ticks on those criteria. You then whittle it down to a shortlist, and the shortlist might be 10, 15 ideas which have multiple ticks. And at this stage, you look at these in more detail. You might combine some of them that are similar, adapt them, talk about, kick them around a little bit. And then very often you will vote, so you give everyone 3 or 4 votes and And they have to choose before anyone votes so they can't be influenced by anyone else. Then they go and they place their stickers next to the ideas they like best, which are on the walls around the room. And very quickly you'll see which are the top ideas. And then what you have to do to complete the day, and this is really very important, is to turn those best ideas into actionable plans. So you identify the key Next steps for the best ideas. Who should carry them forward? How many people are needed? When can this be done? How much money is required? Any particular resources? Any technologies? Any risks or dependencies? These sorts of things you define on one sheet for each idea. So you develop up those action plans. And a very good question to ask at this stage is this: can we test this idea cheaply? Is there a low-risk way of seeing whether customers like this and whether it really works? And that, that's a good question to ask at this stage. So use your checklist for your innovation workshop. Set a clear objective for the day. Decide how you're going to decide. Invite the right mix of people. Use a facilitator. Do some market research. Get some analysis some data beforehand to prepare the ground. Brainstorm very widely using different methods. Go from the long list to a short list and then narrow that down to select the very best winners. And then turn those into action plans and project manage those action plans to success. And I'd like to wish you success with your innovation workshop, and if I can help, please get in touch at destinationinnovation.com. Thank you.