Innovation day webinar - Board of Innovation

Hi, my name is Brian Berger. I'm an innovation consultant here with Board of Innovation. I'm excited to be here to talk you through this webinar on planning an Innovation Day. What I'll be covering in this webinar is three what is an Innovation Day? And why you should consider having one? What does an Innovation Day look like? So, what are some potential formats? And finally, what are some helpful tips to select and plan a successful Innovation Day? If you're looking for more information beyond what's covered in this webinar, you can find more on our website. So let's start with talking about what is an Innovation Day. An Innovation Day is a large format innovation immersion. Large because there's typically more people in the room than you would have in a normal meeting. And all of the people in attendance are taking part in a session that is on a larger scale than normal. An immersion because it's really focused on a deep dedication to innovation. Setting aside some of the other regular barriers of the day to day, all the information in this webinar is designed with large groups in mind thinking about 100 plus people. However, most of the tips that I'll be talking about can also be scaled down into modified smaller formats. So why should you host an Innovation Day? Now, I'll go through a few reasons of why it makes sense to host one and what are the different benefits that you can get from it. First, you can build innovation skills that will allow your employees to innovate in their day to day work. Second, you can really light a fire to jumpstart a focus on the future. Next, you can get a feel for innovation in a really hands on way. Bringing people into the session that and having them experience what innovation looks and what it feels like. Next, there's an opportunity to co create relevant business concepts in an Innovation Day. There's also the opportunity to officially launch an innovation program like an accelerator or an innovation challenge, for example. And finally, it's an opportunity to get exposure and support for an innovation strategy that you may be launching. Now, what does an Innovation Day look like? The first thing to consider is what is the goal of your Innovation Day? Why are you considering even hosting one? And only then when you understand what the goal is, can you determine which format makes the most sense for you. So in this webinar I'll be going through three different formats that we found to be successful for our clients. The first one is really if the goal of your Innovation Day is for your employees to to experience hands on innovation. The second one is if the goal is to create a sense of inspiration and motivation. And finally, if the goal is to address a business challenge. So now I'll go a bit into more detail with each of these different formats. Talking about what the goal of this format is, what an indicative agenda might look like, what are some different tools that that you might see on this kind of day. And finally, what are different pros and cons that you should be considering as you're making a decision of what type of Innovation day you should be planning? A Hands On Innovation Day is the first type of format that I'll talk about. The goal of the Hands On Innovation Day is really to build employee capabilities through a highly participatory experience about what innovation looks and feels like. Oftentimes, this is what you think of when you consider an Innovation Day. A large room with large round tables. Highly interactive. In general, we often come in with a case, an example challenge that the teams will be guided through using tools and exercises throughout the day, all the way from empathy building through experimentation, understanding how to test and validate their concept. An indicative agenda for this type of format often looks like this. A 30 minute innovation keynote in the beginning with a morning focused on empathy building and ideation and the afternoon being focused on selecting and developing a concept, prototyping and experiment design. Setting up an experiment to validate the concept. And then what's also very important is the closing is often focused on reflection, thinking about how the employees and the participants of this session can take the tools, can take the learning and the mindsets that they had throughout the day and bring it back to their daily job so that their innovation doesn't end at the end of the day. Here are some options of different tools that you might see on a hands on innovation format. The first is a customer empathy map. It's a tool to deep dive into the mind of your customer. The second is a concept card, which is a one page template for you to take your idea and turn it into a clear concept overview. And finally we have the Experiment card which helps you design and set up an experiment, allowing you to validate your assumptions. So now let's talk a bit about what are the different pros and cons that you might have of building an innovation day and whether this format is right for you. Some pros of a Hands on Innovation Day are the session is highly interactive and high energy. It really challenges employees to think differently about their way of working. And finally, there's a lot of experience with a variety of tools across the entire innovation process. On the other hand, some things to consider, some cons. Oftentimes, in most cases, the ideas and concepts that are built as a part of the ideation session are not always valuable. After the session, understanding that we're coming into the day a fictitious case. And next, a lot of the tools are used, but only really to a certain depth because when the goal is to be hands on, we're moving quickly and not spending quite as much dedicated time to each individual tool. And finally, if there's no follow up plan or larger goal, it's really easy for this kind of day to be perceived as innovation theater. And what I mean by that is that this day is really just for show. It's something that's fun but really lacks any results or outcomes. And this can have a negative impact on the perception of innovation for your participants. So now let's move on to the second type of innovation format, inspiration and motivation. The goal of this is really to jumpstart a focus on innovation for the future and to develop an innovation strategy. So in this day, participants will hear inspiring innovation stories across multiple industries. They'll be a part of future thinking activities and reflect on the importance and the urgency of innovating within their business. Here is what an indicative agenda of an inspiration and motivation session may look like. It may begin with a one hour inspirational keynote. So talking about innovation on a larger scale and and the importance of it, but also maybe some inspiring examples as well. The morning focusing on future thinking, creative exercises and ideation using industry examples. So what does the future look like and how should we be thinking differently in our daily job in order to be proactive? And the afternoon really focused on innovation strategy tools. The closing for this day is really about empowering, reflection and having the participants build what we call an innovation blueprint, which is really thinking about when the participants end the innovation day and they go back to their job, what is the thing that the next day that they're gonna do when they get back to their jobs? And then one step even above that, what are the participants of this innovation day going to do on a larger scale for their business, for the organization? What is their overall mindset related to innovation? So that is some of the outcomes of the inspiration and motivation format. Some tools that you might see in this type of format are our Future Scan tool, which contains more than 150 different predictions and future trends. Really used as an ideation tool for you to come up with ideas thinking about what the future may look like. Second is our 52 Hacks book, which is a collection of different actions and experiments that that will help you to become an innovator. And finally, we have a client favorite of ours, our Brainstorm cards, which are 52 triggers to generate new business ideas. And this is in the form of an innovation corporate innovation game. So now that you know a bit more about the second format, this inspiration and motivation, let's talk about some different pros and cons to consider when you're trying to make a decision on what type of innovation day makes sense for you. Some pros of this session, the employees leave with an understanding of why they need to innovate. That's quite clear. They're inspired and motivated to go back to their job and to do something about it. There's a sense of urgency. The second pro is that there's a lot of inspirational industry examples that they can bring back to their work and use in their day to day. And finally understanding of the opportunity areas for further exploration. And a lot of this comes from these future thinking exercises that will likely have in the morning session of this type of day some potential cons. The inspiration and motivation format is really focused on why to innovate rather than how to innovate. So in comparison to the hands on innovation day that I already talked about, this is really on the why as opposed to the hands on tools and techniques to use and bring back to your to your job. Another potential con is that the employees will need a way after the session for them to channel their sense of urgency. Really thinking about what happens at the end of the innovation day and how are the participants able to channel their energy. And finally, this is really more of a focus on reflection than on the participation or teamwork building exercises that you may see in some other type of sessions. And finally for the third format, Business challenge. The goal of the business challenge format is really to crowdsource and develop concepts for a specific challenge. So thinking about if you have a business challenge that you want to get different people in a room together to put their heads together and come up with creative solutions, this is a good format for you with a specific scope in mind. An indicative agenda for this type of format may look like a 30 minute inspirational keynote kickoff followed by a morning focus on ideation tools, development of unique business concepts and the afternoon really taking a look at what are some different ways to make money, some different potential business models to explore and also thinking about pitching your concept. Oftentimes the closing, the closing comes together with announcing a winning concept, potentially some business next steps and just one more Thing to note is that this session often ends with a winning team actually getting funding from a pitch or the announcement of an accelerator for example, where the teams are able to come together and bring their idea into an accelerator type program so a safe space for them to continue to move forward with the business concepts that they've generated. Again, the difference between this format and the hands on innovation session which I talked about first, is really that this is focused on a specific business challenge at hand rather than a fictitious case. Some different tools you might see on a day like this in the business challenge format are Revenue Model Flowchart, which is an easy to use poster to find new revenue models and decide which ones are right for you. You also may find our 50 innovative business models book, which is really a visualization of different revenue streams, different business models for you to use as inspiration. And finally the pitching canvas, really helping you visualize the storyline of your pitch, thinking about what is most important for you to share with the key stakeholders, and being able to cover all of the essentials and pitch your story at the end of what the concept you've developed is. Now that you've heard the third type of format, the business Challenge, let's think about what are the different pros and cons related to this format. Some pros are really that the participants will leave the session with tangible business concepts based on a real challenge. The second is that you're really able to bring people together from different functions, with different mindsets within the business, can get their heads together and co create ideas. And finally really an opportunity for the participants to experience firsthand different innovation tools along the way, some potential cons. From upfront work standpoint, this format definitely requires a bit more upfront work and the reason for that is because we want to make sure that the challenge that the business wants to bring forward into this ideation day is scoped correctly in order to get the best results. And at the end of the day, second, by coming into this with an already scoped business challenge, we do run the risk of limiting the creativity because of the natural biases that some of the participants will come in knowing that they're ideating on a business that's relevant to their job. And finally, this might sound familiar to you. If there's no clear action taken coming from the challenge, it could really negatively impact the perceived corporate dedication to innovation. Again really making sure that there's some follow up happening so that the participants are able to keep up their energy and keep up their inspiration to innovate. Now that I've gone through the three different types of formats of different innovation days. I'll now go through some helpful tips for you to keep in mind as you consider planning your Innovation Day. This is a question we often receive from our clients as we're starting to scope their Innovation Day with them. Does it matter how many people are attending? In short, the answer is both yes and no. And the reason I say this is because I'm going to make some recommendations in terms of which of the three formats make the most sense based on the size of your group. But these are by no means a hard and fast rule. So first let's look at the hands on Innovation Day format. For this format, if the goal is really to have a hands on experience, we really like to say that the more hands, the better. One thing to consider in this format is that it is ideal when the people in the room are the same employees who will be going back to their work and taking these tools with them in order to innovate in their day to day job. Next, let's talk about the inspiration and motivation format in this case. This format is really an opportunity to make a statement to a large audience about the importance of changing the way of working and of innovation on a corporate level. And it can often lead to announcements about new corporate innovation initiatives, strategies or launching an accelerator. For instance, it's best to inspire on a large scale and create buy in across all levels of the company. And so for this we often like to say more than 100 people is our recommendation. And finally we have the third format which is the business challenge. And our recommendation is the business challenge can be kept smaller in general because they're most effective when participants have buy in on the relevant challenge. So likely really the people with the potential to be impacted by the outcome of the innovation day. Keeping it smaller also allows for a focus on quality over quantity, which can be important in this case considering that the concepts at the end of the day are have the potential to turn into projects or to be launched in an accelerator program. And it also means in a smaller scale that there's often the opportunity for all of the teams to be able to pitch their concept at the end of the day. Whether this means to a gatekeeper in order to get funding or to move forward in this project, or if it's in the setting of a competition where you have a winning concept at the end as well. While this is a guide, it's really important to consider the size of your group that you'd like to involve and for who does it make the most sense to be involved in your session? The next thing I want to talk about is really the importance of planning and follow up when you're looking at building an Innovation Day. So here let's take a look at a graph that relates time to the employee morale to innovate. Let's assume that you're planning an Innovation Day. And the circle here in black, you can see that the excitement and the morale is really at its peak, let's say at the end of the day, on an Innovation Day. So employees are inspired by the stories that they heard, equipped with new innovation tools and maybe even some business concepts for them to take back to their work. In this graph, you can see the situation and with no planning or follow up after an Innovation Day, then there's the likelihood that your employees will have nowhere for them to channel their energy and motivation to innovate. In reality, this day in retrospect, may be perceived as having been fun, but not impactful in the big picture. So morale might even be lower than it was in the beginning because now employees are looking for the opportunity to innovate within the organization, but are unable to find them. So really showing that the importance of planning and follow up, thinking about what are the employees who are involved in this Innovation Day going to be doing after and next we look at what a potential graph might look like when there are clear next steps. When you provide clear next steps, you're able to keep up the morale of employees to use their learnings and inspiration in the day to day because they have the opportunity, the clear opportunity to do so at the end of the session. For example, some clear next steps might be that an innovation competition is announced and now the participants are able to submit their ideas or be a part of this competition. It also may be the launch of creating a new internal accelerator for participants to bring their ideas into and to test and to validate. Or it might be that the winning competition, sorry, the winning concept, such as in the business challenge format, is actually funded and turned into a real project or a program. Just three examples of different ways that the Innovation Day format can have some clear next steps. It is imperative to realize that the Innovation Day is a critical moment where the morale and the motivation to innovate is at a high. So you need to understand how to capitalize on this. Or you may have employees that are disillusioned. You do not want innovation to be understood as being one fun event per year. This is not the goal of having an Innovation Day. So it's critical to consider your Innovation Day as a part of a larger innovation strategy in order to avoid some of this disillusionment that often comes at the end of this really fun and high energy inspiring day by giving clear next steps. In short, it is important to understand that an Innovation Day is a critical moment to make a statement about what innovation means to your company both in the current day and age. So how employees will go back to their day to day after using some of these tools and new mindsets, but also in the future on the larger in the grand scheme of things. Now that we've talked about how the size of your group may impact the type of Innovation Day format that you choose, and also how the importance of planning and follow up can really lead to the most effective Innovation Day. Now I'll provide you with some more tips to design a successful Innovation Day. The first tip is to train the trainers to help facilitate and what I mean by that is really doing a bit of training before this Innovation Day for a select group of employees in order for them to be able to facilitate the tables to move about the room on the day of, so they'll already know what to expect and how to help different teams on that day to be most effective. The next is really again to set it up as part of a larger initiative, thinking about it on the grand scheme of an innovation strategy. Next, consider if it makes sense to have two days paired together. For example, you may host a hands on Innovation Day on the first day where the participants are able to understand the tools, how to use them in this fictitious case. And then on the second day you have a business challenge format where actually these tools are applied to a relevant business case. Next, it's always really helpful to use a professional production company. It really pays off in the long run because the participants have a much better experience and get the most out of it. Next, link it nicely with other sessions. And this is especially relevant if you're considering doing a session that is shorter than a full day. For example, we have led these sessions anywhere between three hours and eight hours. So if you're considering placing this event among others, it's important to consider that the events both before and after the event are aligned and that there is some cohesion. Otherwise the participants are going to get confused and they may get mixed messages depending on the different events that they're attending. Next, make sure that the group is energized. It's really a simple tip, but quite important. Providing coffee, providing snacks, making sure that there's breaks in order to keep the energy level high in the room. This is a very important thing to keep in mind with the Innovation Day. Finally, be committed to innovation. Not just saying, but also doing again. My name is Brian Berger and I'm an Innovation Consultant here with Board of Innovation, and I'm happy to have led you through this webinar on how to plan a successful Innovation Day. We talked about what an Innovation Day is and why you should host one. We talked about some different potential formats that might make sense for you and your specific needs. And we also talked about some successful tips, tips to keep in mind along the way.