5 Steps for Rapid Innovation

There are 5 easy steps to creating rapid innovation in any organisation, large or small. It’s worth remembering that innovation isn’t about invention. It’s about creating value for an organisation through the delivery of new revenue and new profits. In most cases that means building products and services that meet the needs of customers. Although it can also mean meeting the needs of other stakeholders, like employees, where the goal is to create efficiency.

It’s also worth remembering that creating new things should be done at pace with low ceremony. Taking action and making things happen is the most powerful part of any process or method, not the method itself. Results, results, results!

1. Research

The first step is to undertake some simple research. Your innovation needs to be grounded in solving a problem for someone or making your product or service so much more compelling than your customers.

The trend over the last few years has been to focus on customer journeys and service blueprints. This is a good way to understand what someone is trying to achieve and finding out where the journey breaks down or your customers are experiencing some kind of pain point. The other tool that goes with the journey is the customer persona; a simple summary or thumbnail sketch of your typical customer, their needs, desires and wants. Build something that meets the needs of your customer and you’re on to a winner. There are plenty of great books and online videos about how to do it, like Erika Hall’s ‘Just Enough Research’.

Whilst journey mapping and persona profiling are good tools, they are just that, tools. The most important thing is to engage your customers. Engage them. That might mean observing them trying to buy your services, it might mean looking at data from your website, running some workshops, interviewing people or looking at what your competitors do. Whatever form it takes, the most important thing is that you do it and you focus on the them. You are going to build something that is useful to them, not for yourself and not just to be a cool thing! They are the hero of this story; you are the sage-like guide.

Many organisations spend a lot of time at this stage. The natural inclination it to gather as much data as possible and that often means people end up spending lots of time gathering data, writing it up and synthesising it.

It’s especially true in large, established organisations where high-ceremony processes and a need to make decisions based on lots of data are deeply embedded in the culture. You need to go against this tendency, or it will slow down the whole process and you won’t be able to see the wood for the trees. The art is judging when you have just enough that you can move forward. It should be days and weeks, not weeks and months. You can always go back and gather more data later.

2. Ideas and Experiments

If you haven’t read James Webb Young’s tiny book, ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ then go buy it now. James was an advertising executive and the first chairman or the Advertising Council in the US and wrote this short, but powerful book in 1939. He proposes five steps to creating great ideas that are as relevant today as they were then.

His first step is to gather the raw material. Well, you’ve already carried out some research into your customers and probably the competition too, so you’ve got step one ticked off. But it’s also worth bringing in some additional information in to the ideas stage. Things like tech trends, trends in other industries and insights from the things your customers told you they liked, for example, what brands or products did they tell you they liked and what can you borrow from them?

James’ second step it to work those materials over in your mind; he calls it the ‘Mental Digestive Process’. In his book, he focuses on two principles, that new ideas are combinations of things you already know about and second, they are best derived from relationships between things.

For this reason, if you can, put up the materials you have gathered on the walls of a room, where anyone can come and browse them, and you can immerse yourself in them. Take the time to walk through journeys, discuss your customers with other people and debate and decide what your mission is. Be clear what problem you’re solving, what new opportunity or desire you are meeting. Write it down and ensure that everyone is agreed; especially any sponsors or execs. This is your mission.

Once you’ve done that, then you can start to come up with some ideas to complete your mission. A great way is to ask it straight up: “How might we…”

The best way to do this is in groups. Start off by immersing people in a summary of the research you’ve gathered and your mission and then, as individuals initially, let them come up with ideas to complete the mission. Then ask them to share their ideas with the rest of the group. What happens is that one idea will spark another, diverse experiences and insights, will connect in the room and new combinations will reveal themselves and some trends will emerge.

It doesn’t matter what ideas come to people at this stage, write them down and stick them up on the wall. Some might be way out there, but somewhere in there is the start of what will later become an awesome product or service.

You can run these kinds of workshops with lots of different people, or have people with different backgrounds in the room, it doesn’t matter; just ensure it’s grounded in the mission and you keep going until you run out of ideas or energy. Sometimes those last random thoughts are the best ones, when you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The next step in James’ method is to mull it over. In my experience, one thing most corporates don’t do well, is this bit. For example, they often run all day workshops with the morning focusing on the above and the afternoon building to a point where ideas are narrowed down and a way forward decided.

James’ method acknowledges that there is something powerful about the unconscious mind. How many times have you woken up or been thinking about something else and suddenly had an idea? It often happens at the most random of times and, as James puts it, happens when the mind isn’t straining itself. So, if you can, leave at least an overnight period before coming back to your ideas and deciding which ones you are going to take forward.

The final step for James’ is taking your new born idea and testing it out in the real world. As he says in his book, what you usually find is that it’s not quite the marvellous child it seemed when you gave birth to it. But, by testing it out with other people in your own organisation or, ideally, your customers, you will find that it expands and quickly becomes a more rounded and valuable idea.

You can just ask people what they think, but what’s often even more powerful is if you build a simple ‘thing’ that people can experience. It might be a mocked up online journey, it might be some drawings of a smartphone app, it might be a played-out experience or a mocked-up app. The important thing is that it engages people to think about the idea in depth.

Again, this stage step should days and weeks, not weeks and months!

3. More Experiments

So, you’ve carried out research, you’ve understood the needs and desires of your customers, you’ve clarified your mission, you’ve come up with some ideas and through some simple testing, you have narrowed down what your idea is. The next step is to build something and put it in the hands of customers as quickly as you can.

Back in the 1990s I worked for Enron both in London and Houston, Texas. You’ve probably heard of Enron, if you haven’t it’s worth reading the story online. Although the story doesn’t end well, it does have some good bits along the journey. For me, one of them was innovation and the speed at which we could deliver technology-based solutions for the commercial teams. Fortune magazine named Enron the most innovative company for 6 consecutive years. It’s just a shame that extended to the finance department!

It seems old fashioned now, but in the 90’s we had RAD (Rapid Application Development) teams embedded in the business. Their job was to build technology solutions to help the commercial teams take advantage of new opportunities at speed. People at Enron understood that innovation meant generating new revenue and new profits; our focus was just that. Not form filling or following a process for the sake of it but focusing on generating revenue and profits.

One time, the European power trading team saw an opportunity in market and within days a RAD team had built a solution and it was being used. Over the weeks that solution was iterated and iterated, almost daily, as more things were learnt. Like many market opportunities it went away after a few weeks as everyone else caught up, but the Enron team had cleaned up and dominated the market because they had the tools to do it.

It’s that kind of approach you need to take at this stage. You need to have a mindset that you are on your mission to deliver your idea and you will act with speed and iterate to achieve it. Be mission driven, not process driven!

Organisations try and overcome bureaucracy and high ceremony by setting up Innovation Labs, spinning something off or they do it on the side. In my experience, whilst this gives the team space, it can create a sense of a clique and can mean that many of the valuable lessons from working in a different way aren’t metamorphosed into the wider organisation. If you can, set up a team right in the middle of your core business and start there.

Whether your team is embedded or off to the side, they must have the right mindset. They need to be comfortable with ambiguity, enjoy learning by doing and be able to work at their own direction. Their mission and success factors must be crystal clear and set them a time box (weeks, not months) and tell them to engage with customers from day 1. Then get out of the way and let them experiment with technology and solutions and test them out. Trust them.

They’ll quickly find out what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll end up at a decision point. Should you take the idea forward or kill it off. There are just a few data points you need: do customers like it? Will it make money? What will it take to build, and can we do it?

4. Launch a Minimal Viable Product or Service

I have had plenty of debates with leaders in organisations about an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and it is usually where things slow down or stop. Typically, you are in a room talking about the scope of an MVP. Everyone nods that they get the concept and agree that’s absolutely the right approach. Then you start talking about the scope and what should be in the MVP. That’s when the trouble starts. You quickly find a huge list of ‘must have’ features before we launch. People say things like, ‘we must have all these features so that people can’t copy and catch us up’ or ‘IT won’t let us go live unless we have all these things ticked off,’ ‘Compliance will never buy that!’

People can’t help it. They have mostly worked in large organisations and that’s the way things are done. You have to have grit and determination to push through a true MVP. One technique I’ve found useful is to get the team deciding on the scope to timebox their MVP. What if you only had 2 weeks, a month or 6 weeks to deliver something, what would the scope be? What if this was your own money and your house was mortgaged to finance it and you need to get to market as quickly as possible; what would your MVP be then?

It’s amazing how quickly people ditch unneeded features and really focus on what’s important. Again, this needs to be anchored to your mission and tested with customers as much as possible. It needs to be a combination of tech, design and marketing. Launch it as soon as you can and start getting feedback from day one.

If you haven’t read Eric Reis’ the Lean Startup, then add that to the list of books to buy.

5. Iterate Until it’s Not Worth It Anymore

If you’ve launched your MVP and it’s in the hands of customers, then you have a choice to make. Is it worth carrying on? If this was your own money and your housed was mortgaged against it, would you carry on? If not, then be brave and kill it.

If it does make sense to carry on, then build on the MVP and add new features on a regular basis, carry on with the same mindset: focus on the mission, continually engage with customers and be a growth hacker.

When you find new features aren’t achieving much new value, stop and pivot the team on to something else. Too many organisations plateau once they have achieved a new way of working and launched a new product or service. They often leave the team in place for too long, attached to their baby. Which is a missed opportunity as they would have learnt a lot and can either transfer those skills and learnings to others or be even more efficient about building the next awesome product or service. Move people around and spread the love.

My key take-aways

1. Anchor your ideas in customers’ needs, wants and desires.
2. Continually engage your customers — find out what they want, test out ideas and get feedback.
3. Just do enough — don’t waste time or effort when you don’t need to.
4. Be mission driven, not process driven.
5. It’s mostly about grit and determination to make stuff happen.
6. Have fun — it can be some of the most rewarding work you’ll do if you let go and embrace it.