Cense

Innovation to Impact

Persistence: The Innovation Process Outcome

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When looking to evaluate innovation many seek to find numbers related to product adoption, revenue generated, people reached, when what they ought to consider first is process outcomes.

Sustainable innovation — a process, practice, and culture of design-driven creation — is the most valuable outcome for any organization. Innovation is not about creating a single item — product, service, policy — it’s about doing it regularly, consistently, over time.

Regular innovation only comes from persistence or what Seth Godin calls The Practice.

Measuring the practice — the amount of activity, persistence, and consistency of effort — is what any organization should be evaluated against. It fits with what we know about design thinking, performance and innovation: the more ideas you generate, the more prototypes you create, and the more attempts you make the more likely you are to have better ideas, more successful products, and create transformation.

Coming up with a single successful innovation is mostly good if you’re seeking to be bought up by a competitor and, while that can be lucrative, it’s not a sustainable strategy and is contingent on having one very good idea. Having many good ideas and having them implemented into practice is what creates sustainable, resilient organizations. It is what allows organizations to adapt in times of crisis and create new opportunities in times of contraction within your market.

This is what a culture of innovation is all about.

Metrics of Effort

There are many metrics and methods that can help capture the effort of your team in developing that culture of innovation. These can be used to complement questions we might ask about design thinking. Here are a few:

  • Number of attempts
  • Number of ideas generated / ideation sessions engaged in
  • Number of concepts proposed and prototypes developed
  • Background research gathered (e.g., artifacts)**
  • Consistently of application (i.e., ongoing use of a process and fidelity)
  • Number of solicitations for feedback from internal and external sources
  • Integrations within existing processes and tools
  • Materials used
  • Evaluation designs created for products or services
  • Evaluations implemented
  • Number of products launched outside of the organization
  • Number of new innovations generated (may be products, processes, or policy improvements)
  • Persistence of effort (e.g., continuity of activity, sequencing, and time-spent)

** note that research can be a trap. It’s easy to get stuck in over-researching something. While important as a product, it’s only useful if the research converts to real process or product efforts.

These are part of an Innovation Implementation Index that can help you to assess what innovation activities that you are undertaking and whether they are leading to an actual output or outcome.

By looking at not only what you do but how often and persistent your efforts are you will later be able to assess how your organization adopts, builds, and benefits from a culture of innovation.

Are you looking to build this with your organization, unit, or team? Contact us and we can help you build, assess, and sustain a culture of innovation in your organization.

Activity Analysis

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This simple technique is among the most powerful at eliciting a lot of information. When we look at an existing service, it may be easy to describe what people do to deliver, manage, and receive the service in simple terms. For example, an exchange between a bank teller and a client might be described as simply as a person walking up to a desk, asking for money, inserting their bank card, receiving money from the teller, and leaving.

An Activity Analysis would break this down even further. It would involve tracking the experience of the client. It would denote what the client did from the moment she entered the bank, what she saw, what she smelled or experienced, her feelings or thoughts, and the steps she took toward the desk.

You might ask how long she took, whether she stopped en route to the desk, knew where it was (did she ask for directions?) or did she wait in line and for how long.

We can also track what the teller was doing up to and including the moment of engagement with the client. What tasks was she doing? Where was her focus? What is she thinking or feeling?

This is a micro-method version of A Day in the Life, which is another method that helps us understand what our service clients do and use.

How to do it

Activity Analysis can be done as a group, facilitated by a leader to help organize and manage the activity. It’s a great way to get people talking about all that is going on with the actors, the environment, and the tasks. By opening up the discussion and walking through each step in the journey through the service with each actor, everything that shapes the environmental conditions, and the tasks that are performed, you’ll reveal an enormous amount of data about what actually transpires with even the simplest transaction.

This can be used to seed further questions like:

  • What infrastructure is needed to support the interaction?
  • What would be ideal?
  • How might this interaction look different?
  • What other variables could affect the journey and the outcome?
  • What could be done or introduced to make this better?

Activity analysis is something that can be done in small groups over the course of 20 to 60 minutes, depending on the complexity of the task and the amount of knowledge the participants have of the task or activity.

This simple analysis can reveal information about flows, resources, outcomes, and processes that are in place to support your service and help you see what’s not only in place, but what is possible, too.

This can be a great way to bring people together as well as lead your service design and evaluation efforts. If you want to implement this approach in your organization and need help, reach out to us. We’d welcome hearing from you.

Perspective Taking: The Power of Ten

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Great innovators often see problems or solutions that others miss. This is as much about perception as it is anything else.

To illustrate the power of perception, consider the famous perceptual illusion below which profiles a young girl and an old woman (or “wife” and “mother in law”). The image, which dates back to 1888, shows how the same image can produce two very different stories about the subject matter.

There’s a way to create the same effect by looking at a situation through the lens of time. The Power of Ten is a perceptual forecasting and innovative technique that can help you can perspective on a situation, a product, or service by looking at the effects in layers, each offering a new possibility.

How to do it

The Power of Ten technique is simple. Take the current situation, topic, product, or service and forecast what might happen in ten minutes from now, ten hours, ten days, ten weeks, ten months, and ten years.

In some cases, you’ll find little effect or difference between the two and in others the differences are dramatic.

Consider waiting times for a service call. In that case, ten minutes might be a long time and ten hours is insufferable. If you are on a waitlist for an elective surgery, ten days might be incredibly fast, ten weeks reasonable, and ten months is anxiety producing.

What about a particular situation? Consider the dynamic situation that unfolded with the COVID-19 pandemic and policies that affected how and where we work. Time perception changed, value changed (e.g., Internet access), and certain things like parks, groceries, restaurants and bars, and video conference tools all changed their value in a matter of days, weeks, and months in different ways.

The Power of Ten activity is designed for you to forecast and spend some time thinking about what will something look like, feel like, interact with, and impact the world at each of these different scales.

This simple exercise will allow you to see constraints, opportunities, effects, and interactions that are either not present or imperceptible at one scale at other scales. This allows you to see connections between things that were not perceived before.

This is best done as a group and can be performed in a short time as a facilitated activity or at a distance.

If you want to see possible futures using this approach and want help, contact us. We can help you multiply your perspective by a power of ten.

Note: This exercise draws inspiration for a video first produced in the 1970s by the legendary design partnership of Charles and Rey Eames for IBM.

7 Questions to Evaluate Design Thinking

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Design thinking is much more than sticky notes, whiteboards and creative exploration. It’s impact can be felt in the outputs and outcomes tied to actual product or service and much further if we allow ourselves to focus on that.

Here are 7 questions that we ask of design thinking that focus on the learning outcomes and uncover the true impact of creation, design, and execution, which is a big part of what design thinking is all about.

By asking these we can better tap into the true return on investment of design thinking as a transformative approach to learning, not just product or service design.

  1. What do people learn in the process of engaging in design thinking?
  2. What new skills to people acquire, develop, or refine through design thinking?
  3. How are the lessons from engaging in design thinking applied to other subsequent products?
  4. What is the effect of design thinking on the mindset of those involved in a design-oriented project?
  5. How does the co-design process influence team development, cohesion, creativity, and innovation performance?
  6. What role does design thinking play in shaping the innovation culture (e.g., creation, execution, delivery, and evaluation) with an organization?
  7. How does design thinking contribute to the implementation of innovations?

Evaluating the impact of your products or services is always important, but if you focus only on that you will miss some of the biggest benefits that design thinking offers your organization when done well.

If you need or want help in learning how your team learns and amplifying the effects of design thinking, contact us and we’ll help you out.

Note: This article was inspired by a recent post on our sister blog, Censemaking, which focuses on ideas, commentary and issues tied to innovation.

Innovation Design Quality Control

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You want and need help in transforming your organization or business line and are seeking a consultant to help you. What should you look for? Let’s look at questions and issues you may want to consider when starting an innovation journey.

We break it down into three (plus) areas: Design research and foresight, service development, and evaluation.

Design Research

Design research is about exploring the problem or circumstance that you’re looking to intervene in through introducing a new product, service offering, or policy (which we’ll refer to as an innovation).

Design research is much more than ‘doing your homework’ and is meant to work with any marketing and financial studies you may have done. Design research is about exploring your end-user(s) — both identified and potential additional users. Responsible design research is also about looking at who else your innovation affects.

It will incorporate systems thinking into the process by considering the various ways in which your innovation affects and is affected by the various interconnections around it. For example, your service might be tied to other things (e.g., supply chain, regulatory issues, community norms) and good design research will help articulate these and allow you to map and model systems using visual tools.

Your innovation design team should have skills in design and research and understand a variety of methods and approaches such as quantitative analysis, qualitative data collection, sensemaking (for innovations dealing with complex situations), and behavioural science. The last point — behavioural science – is what allows you to understand what, why, and how an individual or group will choose to engage with your innovation and serves as a foundation for the next stage of work: service development.

But first, let’s go a little ahead into the future to look at the other part of design research: foresight.

Foresight

Strategic foresight is an approach to research that looks at the trends and drivers that influence specific domains of interest like your market, community, or social life as a whole. It draws on a variety of data sources such as published reports, publicly available (or privately held — if you have access) databases, as well as a series of exercises and activities that allow you and other stakeholders to envision what possible futures might look like.

The UK Social innovation agency Nesta has a useful, accessible primer on some of the methods that are used to envision futures.

Future-thinking is important because your innovation will always be applied to tomorrow, not today. Sustainable, effective innovations are those that meet emerging needs not just present ones. Foresight considers how and why things might change and, when combined with strategy and behavioural science, allows you to shape the design of your innovation to better anticipate and (hopefully) meet those changes as they emerge.

Service Development

Service development can include everything from exploring the physical space where your innovation will be deployed to undertaking usability research on digital platforms. The range of practices associated with what is more commonly called service design are many and when enlisting support to design your innovation it’s critical to ensure you have the right talent.

Service design often seeks to develop models of your intended users based on the design research you’ve undertaken. This can result in tools such as personas that provide evidence-informed caricatures of your users that you can use to develop and test scenarios.

Service design methods incorporate visual thinking methods and tools and design thinking by exploring the research, developing ideas, testing and trying these ideas out in ways that inform strategy, and then deploying them into the world. Having a design team with skills in design methods, facilitation, and visual presentation will make this much easier.

Visuals can include everything from simple (but illustrative) maps like the image above to more sophisticated visual models, ‘gigamaps‘, and storyboards.

Evaluation

Last and certainly not least is evaluation. It’s one thing to design an innovation, it’s another to know whether it does what you think it does. Evaluation allows us to assess what kind of impact our innovation has on the world, what processes lead to that impact, and what aspects of our service, product, or policy are most likely influencing this impact.

It is through evaluation of our innovation that we are better able to fine-tune, amplify, or retract our offering to ensure it’s creating the most benefit and not doing harm. Evaluation also allows us to understand what hidden value our innovation might be offering, to articulate your return on investment (ROI), and to widen your perception of what your innovation does and could do.

Bringing in design firms that do not build in professional-grade evaluation to the project is like doing half the work. What good is your new product or service if you have little idea how or whether it works in the real world over time?

These are some of the things that anyone looking to develop an innovation in-house or with a consultant team needs to consider. We have a lot of resources on our learning page on some of these methods and tools as well as overall approaches to supporting groups in asking better questions prior to engaging a contractor.

This is what we do. If you want help with any of this and doing good, quality service design, design research, evaluation and foresight, please reach out and contact us. We’d love to hear from you.