Innovator's Playbook

How to Create Great Products, Services and Experiences that Your Customers Will Love

Nathan Baird

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780730383642
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780730383666
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: R&D
• Index: Business

Take a Design-led Approach to Innovation

Innovation drives growth in organisations and entire economies. Yet innovation is hard, risky and rarely successful. Most innovations and startups fail because of a lack of focus on the front end of the innovation process where customer needs are researched, insights are distilled, solutions are ideated, prototyped and tested and business models are shaped. But innovation doesn't have to be this way.

In Innovator's Playbook, author and leading Design Thinking expert Nathan Baird shares his 20 years of hands-on experience, tools and methods for developing a winning customer-centric approach to innovation.

This book will teach you how to apply the design thinking method to innovation and help you to innovate better with five practical and proven stages:

1. Build the right team for innovation.

2. Better understand your customer through empathy.

3. Distill and refine customer-centric needs and insights.

4. Unleash your team's creativity to create fresh new ideas

to address customer needs.

5. Experiment and validate desirable, feasible and viable solutions.

Innovator's Playbook helps entrepreneurs, corporate teams, startups and leaders across all levels to use design-led methodologies for start-to-finish innovation success.

1
Get Started

Before you start your project you’ll need to assemble a crack multidisciplinary team and clearly define the opportunity area you want to innovate. You’ll tighten up its focus and scope, getting alignment with your team, sponsor and key stakeholders. Finally, you’ll have fun designing a space to play home for your team. In this stage you will learn how to set up for success.

So you’ve decided to go on an innovation journey. How do you set yourself and your team up for success on a journey that will be unpredictable, complex and ambiguous at times, and iterative, not linear, in nature? Before you dive into the real work of identifying customer needs you need to make sure you and your team are ready to get started.

In this chapter I’ll show you how to set yourself up for success. (Keep in mind this chapter isn’t meant to be a replacement for good project management —you’ll need that too — or the development of a proper innovation strategy.)

Preparing your team

Innovation is a team sport. I liken it to team orienteering rather than a relay race. Not only is the orienteering trail more unpredictable than an athletics track, it also requires the team to work together side by side to navigate their way around the course, unlike handing over a baton to the next runner in a relay. Too often in organisations we work in our siloed departments, doing handovers from one team to the next. At each handover we risk losing the integrity of the original insights and ideas, as each team intentionally or unintentionally adds their own spin or flavour to the solution.

Team makeup

Just like a sports team you’re going to need an experienced cross-functional team with a variety and depth of skills to complete the wide range of tasks required to develop a new innovation. Having a ‘true cross-functional team’ is fifth in Cooper’s top nine success factors of innovation, as discussed in the section, My journey of discovery to innovation flow.

You also want diversity to ensure expansive thinking, insights and ideas, as well as connection to different networks, both internally and externally. Having a multidisciplinary team will help with this, but you also want diversity of backgrounds, cultures, gender, age and mindset.

Ideally you’ll have a core team of around six to ten people. The bigger your team gets the harder it’s going to be to schedule meetings, especially if the project is in addition to your day job. According to Head of Innovation at Method, an eco-friendly cleaning product company, Joshua Handy, one of the biggest killers of innovation is ‘having to schedule a meeting and create a PowerPoint presentation’. The components of this team will vary by industry, but will likely include a:

• project ‘innovation’ leader
• project manager (highly recommended)
• research specialist
• marketing specialist
• sales specialist
• development/technology specialist
• packaging specialist
• supply chain specialist
• finance specialist
• design specialist.

Often the project leader is also one of the functional specialists. Having a dedicated project manager means everyone can focus on their specialist roles and leave the project management to the project manager. These people will be engaged throughout the project journey, not just for their specific functional expertise.

You’ll also need a project sponsor. Whether the innovation project is full time or in addition to your day job, you are going to need senior sponsorship to provide project legitimacy, ground cover, free up the necessary time and resources, make connections and remove barriers.

In addition to the core team you’ll have a ‘bench’ of subject matter experts and suppliers that you’ll need to draw on from time to time, for example legal, customer recruitment agencies, visualisers and facilitators. The facilitator will guide you through the key workshops and possibly even facilitate the entire journey. It is important the facilitator stays neutral about decisions, so as to encourage everyone’s input. For this reason the project leader should not be the facilitator. This book is written as if directed to the innovation leader or facilitator, but is equally useful to anyone interested in designing and running a better innovation journey to create innovations your customers will love.

Team performance

Just like a sports team, you won’t win at innovation if you haven’t got a cohesive and high-performing team. Even if on paper it is the best list of experts anyone could muster, if they don’t play well together, you won’t succeed. We’ve all been on good and bad teams. Table 1.1 shows some of their characteristics.

Table 1.1 worst and best team characteristics

Worst	Best
Political	Imaginative
Personal agendas are pursued	Trusting
Directionless	Respectful
Error pron...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• My journey of discovery to innovation flow
• What’s all this noise about design?
• Stage 1 Get Started
• Stage 2 Discover
• Stage 3 Distill insights
• Stage 4A Ideate: Incubate & create
• Stage 4B Idea Generation Workshops
• Stage 5A Experiment: Desirability
• Stage 5B Experiment: Feasibility & Viability
• Over to you – your journey to innovation flow
• About the author
• Index
• End User License Agreement