The Minimum Innovation Framework for Innovation Teams
Amidst the overwhelming 'innovation blah, blah', even the most ardent innovators might cringe at the mention of another framework. Terms have become jaded, and yes, innovation fatigue is real.
But when I talk about setting up an innovation framework, I'm referring to building an internal innovation engine within your organization – because that’s needed for scaling, developing, and consistently bringing new ideas from concept to market, over and over again.
Imagine you're a new Head of Innovation.
Whether new to the role or the organization, you're aiming for a few quick wins and in the long term, demonstrating innovation ROI.
But how can you achieve these goals, when the odds seem stacked against you? As we are going through uncertain times - no need to list all current uncertainties - the business appetite for investing in innovation is shrinking, while at the same time, many business stakeholders undermine innovators to preserve their own position and influence.
Your approach needs to be quick, low-cost, effective, and feasible, even with a small team of two, or three people (which is not that uncommon even in large organizations).
Here's how to build your innovation engine, step-by-step, with recommended tools and methods, and the expected output for each step.
Step 1: Define For ‘Who'
It’s absolutely terrifying if your proposition is for everybody. If you don’t know who your customer is, you are going to fail.
So you got to start with the user. I am not the biggest fan of personas, but try to identify a sizeable group with shared goals, needs, and problems your product or service could potentially solve. That’s your Minimum Viable Segment (MVS) of the customers you want to target.
Talk to them. Ask them everything and look at everything through their eyes. What do they want? What are they doing? How they are doing it? Where they struggle?
- Recommended Method: One-to-one user-interviews.
- Outcome: Customer Experience or Customer Journey Map
For internal innovations, substitute Customer Journey Maps with Process or Service Blueprints.
As you learn more things about your customers keep your customer journeys updated in a digital format that’s easy to reference and share. A tool like Miro or Mural will do just fine.
Jim Kalbach’s book “Mapping Experiences” is a useful guide for this stage.
❌ Don’ts.
Avoid relying solely on idea submission platforms. Best case scenario one in ten ideas has any potential, and you will quickly run out of bandwidth to validate them. If something like this already exists in your organization, ensure any chosen idea aligns with findings from customer interviews.
✅ Do’s.
Just do it. You’ll already be ahead of 90% of your competitors, it’s shocking how few organizations speak to customers.
Step 2: Define the Problem (or Need)
The number one reason companies fail is they are not solving a valuable enough problem.
Obviously, this step is a natural progression from the previous one. After talking to your customers, you will have some promising ideas. While you’ll be tempted to start working on them and turn them into new offerings, I caution patience.
Before you do that you will want to make sure that those opportunities align with the business objectives and KPIs, as at the end of the day your new product will need to make money for business. This part is particularly important when measuring the ROI of innovation as you’ll be able to link innovation results to business KPIs.
To do that, it will be your job as an innovation manager to engage the business stakeholders and make sure of that. The biggest challenge here is the poor availability of these people, and given the fact they operate at a more strategic, high level, and are not attuned anymore to customer issues, they might struggle to understand the innovation opportunities.
- Recommended Method: Problem Framing.
It requires only a few hours from busy executives, speeds up decision making and secures buy-in for innovation initiatives.
For guidance, check out the Problem Framing Canvas and this rapid Problem Statement Workshop.
- Outcome: Clearly defined problem statement that maps business objectives to actual customer problems. Or the other way round.
Step 3. Define the Solution
Now it’s time to create a value proposition that customers can’t resist.
Unless you can tell the future or read minds, you will need to settle for the next best thing: experimentation — fail fast, learn fast.
Because when things are changing so quickly, the correct answer is going to be found by those who are experimenting faster than their competition.
Since your innovation team is likely nimble, you will need to be able to bring together a diverse, expert team with a wide range of skills and capabilities to build the solutions you are testing. This is also important because it allows the innovation team to operate alongside the business, partnering, as opposed to on the side of the business, not really being taken seriously - the weirdos playing with post-its.
- Recommended Method: The Design Sprint.
Given the need for speed, customer-centricity and cross-functional teams the design sprint is the perfect choice as it ticks all of the boxes → What is a Design Sprint?
The method is so versatile it can be used as a building block for a variety of innovation programs.
- Outcome: A validated Customer Value Proposition (CVP) in just five days.
Once you are at this point, you can loop back in your stakeholders, who have already given their buy-in, and decide how to move forward with these CVPs.
To summarize, the minimum innovation framework that will set you up for success has the following components:
- Define the Who (MVS)
- Define the Problem
- Define the Solution (CVP)
The methods used have a recipe-like structure, which makes it easy for the innovation team to learn and apply them. At the same time, they are effective and accelerate the cycle from idea to learning, gaining momentum to deliver results.
Does it work?
Absolutely. RGA, a Fortune 500 insurance company, successfully built their innovation engine using this approach. Discover more in "Life Design Sprints: How to Deliver Innovation in the Digital Insurance Customer Journey.”
