Innovation Planning
Note: If you are looking for information on planning a comprehensive
innovation strategy, read about our
Corporate Innovation Machine Strategy...
Download the Innovation Plan
Worksheet (PDF: 17kb)
Download a PDF version of this article
(PDF: 88kb)
“We need fresh ideas for the Acme proposal. Let's all sit down
and brainstorm ideas some time this week.” How often have you heard
something like that at your office? How often have the creative ideas
of the brainstorming session been implemented? All too often, hastily
planned brainstorming sessions bring up a lot of good ideas that somehow
never get used, while the boring kinds of ideas you are trying to get
away from seem to be used again and again.
One reason for this is the lack of an innovation plan. If you want to
maximise the creativity of the ideas you generate and ensure the best
ideas are implemented, you need an innovation plan. To make things easier,
we have created an Innovation
Plan Worksheet (PDF document; 17kb) here. As this article will describe
the Innovation Plan, you may want to download it now as a reference.
Your Goal/Problem...
The first step of your innovation plan is to state the goal or problem.
We'll look in detail at how to effectively state your problem in an upcoming
issue of Report 103, but let us review the basics here. Imagine you are
a product manager at a mobile telephony company and want to introduce
new services to your clients.
Before putting stating a problem like “new services”, you
need to think about your goal in a little more detail. Do you want to
develop new revenue streams for your company or do you want to add additional
free services? Are you targeting a specific group – such as business
users or teenagers? Or should determining the target group be part of
your goal? Bear in mind that I have used the term “goal” here.
Think not just about what kind of ideas you want – but the goal
of the ideas. Finally, be sure you express the goal in a way that is clear
to everyone on your team.
You also need to establish how far you will take the innovation. Are
you simply preparing a proposal for management or will you be responsible
for the entire project life-cycle or does the limit of your responsibility
fall somewhere in between?
Once the goal is stated, you should also consider several other issues...
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Participants: who will participate in your innovation plan?
Can you solicit ideas from the entire organisation or will you be
restricted to a specific project team? Who can you call upon for evaluation
and pre-implementation?
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Budget: what is the budget for capturing and developing this
idea?
-
Resources: what resources will be available for capturing
and developing this idea? What tools do you need? Can you hire facilitators
or an ideas campaign tool? Can you hire facilities for brainstorming?
What internal resources will be available to you?
-
Timeframe: how much time do you have to capture and develop
your ideas.
-
Reward(s): are you offering any rewards for ideas? You might
want to offer a small reward for the best ideas. One well known company
offers small cash rewards and dinner coupons to people who contribute
exceptional ideas. Others offer gifts, points or recognition. If you
are working with a relatively small team, you might consider rewarding
the entire team at the completion of the product – or at major
milestones if the project is long-term.
If you like to push the envelop and have fun, consider adopting a theme
for this innovation plan. Themes are not necessary, but can be an effective
means of focusing creativity in new ways and tying together various aspects
of an innovation plan. Keeping to our example of a mobile telephony company,
you could adopt the theme of “amusement parks”. In other words,
you would use amusement parks as a metaphor when generating ideas, implementing
ideas and even naming new services that you devise. This doesn't mean
that everything has to be about amusement parks. Rather, amusement parks
are simply a focus of the team's thinking.
Idea generation methods...
Now, you are ready to plan how you will generate ideas. Don't limit yourself
to brainstorming, there are several effective team ideation approaches
worth considering...
Brainstorming: is best when time is limited or the team is relatively
small and in one location (although software tools, like our Sylvia
web brainstormer, allow brainstorming between people in various locations).
Brainstorming, in a nutshell, is getting a group of people together in
a space and shouting out ideas for a limited time period. People build
on each others' ideas and the creative energy pushes people to think more
creatively and propose more radical ideas.
Ideas campaigns: are best when there is more time or the team is large
and dispersed across several locations. An ideas campaign is rather like
a long, drawn out brainstorming session where people come in to the campaign
from time to time, share an idea or two, build on other people's ideas
and then leave. (Our Jenni
ideas campaign is the best tool for setting up and managing an ideas
campaign. Moreover, you can even rent Jenni for a single limited ideas
campaign). An ideas campaign usually lasts from two to six weeks.
Experimentation: is best when ideas are technical in nature. Experimentation
is basically a matter of putting together various configurations and seeing
how they work. Experimenting would not be an effective approach for our
mobile telephony company example of developing a new service. On the other
hand, if the innovation plan was about improving the efficiency of sending
multimedia data across a GSM network, experimenting would probably be
an important part of your innovation plan.
Other approaches to ideation can include outsourcing creativity to another
company, buying the rights to an established idea or buying a company
that has innovative products you would like to be able to offer your customers.
Once you start generating ideas, bear in mind that there is a tendency
in teams to embrace the first creative idea that you capture. This can
be a mistake. Rather you should push that first creative idea further
and see if you can make it even more creative. At the same time, you should
push people to come up with more creative ideas. This pushing for further
creativity is important and should be included in your innovation plan.
Pushing ideas further could be a matter of doing brainstorming sessions
on your best ideas, in order to develop them further. Alternatively, you
could ask people to think about the best ideas overnight and give you
more developed ideas in the morning. “Sleeping” on an idea
is an excellent way to push it.
Pushing people's creativity further is about positive feedback, explicitly
encouraging more radical thinking and inspiration. Inspiration includes
all kinds of things, such as: bringing in professional brainstorming facilitators;
taking the team to an art museum or ballet performance; participating
in activities that open the mind; and using alternative brainstorming
approaches (see back
issues of Report 103 for examples of alternative brainstorming approaches).
Finally, you need to allot a specific time frame for the idea generation
phase.
Initial evaluation...
Once you have captured some good ideas, you need to evaluate them to
determine which are worth taking further. The 5x5 criteria matrix is probably
the most efficient initial evaluation method (see our
article on evaluating ideas for more details and a link to a free
5x5 criteria matrix evaluation tool). To do a 5x5 criteria matrix, you
simply determine five criteria by which you can rank promising ideas.
You then look at each idea, determine how well it meets each criterion
and grant it 0-5 points for that criterion. Once you are finished, add
up the points and you will have overall point scores for each idea. This
is a very good basis for determining which ideas should go on to the next
stage.
Other people prefer open discussion meetings for determining which ideas
to take further. These can also be effective, although such meetings are
usually less efficient and less objective than criteria based evaluation
– at least for the initial evaluation. We recommend that you have
an open discussion based meeting AFTER the criteria based evaluation in
order to clarify any outstanding issues and discuss how promising ideas
could be improved further based on the evaluation results.
You also need to allot some time to the evaluation phase.
Report...
If you are not involved in implementing the idea, the chances are your
responsibility will end with making a report to your superior or to a
project development team. If so, you can readily prepare a report based
on the top ideas and their evaluations.
If you are involved in the implementation, on the other hand, you will
want to go directly to the next step.
Pre-implementation...
Pre-implementation is a preliminary action, such as building a business
case, doing market research, making a prototype or running a limited trial
in order to test an idea.
You will doubtless already have standard pre-implementation methods in
your company for developing ideas into products or services. Nevertheless,
it is important to include the pre-implementation in your innovation plan.
You also need to determine how much time to allot the pre-implementation.
Implementation...
By now, you should have a small number of very good and well tested ideas.
It is time to implement them.
By developing such a structured innovation plan for specific projects,
you can look forward to more creative ideas and a higher level of implementation
of those ideas.
Good luck!
By Jeffrey Baumgartner
© 2005 jpb.com
Download the Innovation Plan
Worksheet (PDF: 17kb)
Download a PDF version of this article
(PDF: 88kb)
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