With the dynamic environment of COVID the business world chaotic right now. It is also causing a need to rapidly innovate, which is outside the comfort zones of many companies and teams. Innovation in normal times can look chaotic and unstructured and to try to do it now with the moving targets of COVID can seem even more daunting.
The good news is that there are methods and tools to help you get organized in your innovation approach. Below is a quick start guide to innovation.
Innovation: A Different Way Of Thinking
The rules are changing everyday, sometimes within the same day, a shift to an innovation way of thinking will help enable the adaptability that is required in these fluid times.
Innovation
Innovation is about taking an educated guess (a hypothesis - if you remember from science class), testing the idea/guess quickly, minimizing the risks, learning and iterating. Through out that process you are learning and discovering what value you have to what customer and how to deliver that value to them. Innovation is a process of learning, creating, testing and iterating.
Operation
Regular business operations are focused on executing and optimizing to deliver value to your customers efficiently and effectively, and often there are clear goals and targets to achieve. Normally when operating a business you know the rules of the game and you get very good at working within those rules and sometimes knowing the rules better than your competitor provides you a competitive advantage. Today all the rules are changing moment to moment and an innovation mindset could help you operate your business.
Analogy: Innovation verse Operations
Business operations is about achieving a list of known tasks on time and on budget. Innovation is outlining a list of tasks you think you need to do and after you complete each task you review and rewrite the outline based on the result of that task.
How To Start 1: Create A Baseline
Get organized by defining your baseline or starting point. This is something everyone can do and you already know how to do this.
Map out the current process of how you operate - the business operations.
You can start with a rough black box mapping of only key steps
You can go as detailed as you want.
You can be detailed in some areas and not as detailed in other areas
Map out your customer’s experience
Like above you can be specific or general
Know your numbers
Really understand the math of your operation.
Start to think like a startup - managing a run way of cash and making strategic investments to build your new business model.
List out the new rules/what has changed
Need to start tracking what is changing that will impact your business. The rules are changing. Identify what rules have changed.
Tips:
Map your process and customer experience on a wall with post-it notes. Use one color for you process and one color for your customer experience (often there is an over lap at different spots. Red post-it notes will be good for How to Start #2. A big whiteboard is always an innovator’s favorite tool. Be sure to take pictures. There are also many tools to do this digitally, from powerpoint, google docs to Adobe, mural, onenote, etc.
How To Start 2: Identify Problems
Now that you have the baseline the next step is to identify and define what is different, what has changed, what doesn’t work etc.
What has COVID broken in your operation process?
Highlight or circle on your baseline process and note why it is broken now.
Tip: This is where post-it notes are good - you can put one right under the step in the process and write on the post-it note why: this new rule, or staff aren’t trained to do X that is now needed etc.
What has COVID broken or changed for the customer experience?
Highlight or circle on your baseline customer experience and note why it is broken now.
List out the different things that are “broken”.
List anything and everything from the smallest detail to the largest most fundamental thing to your business.
Note: These things can be interdependent, especially the customer story that is okay, make a note when these things are connected or interdependent. One change in your operating process can really change the customer experience or if customers now want to have a zero contact experience -
How To Start 3: Define & Prioritize Problems
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
Defining a problem is easier said than done but very important:
Review your list, process and costumer journey and rule changes.
Try group problems and challenges together.
Try to understand the core problem(s)/challenge you face.
Notes:
Right now many are pretty obvious - ie can’t have people come into the store.
Normally, what the core problem is isn’t always obvious usually the problems people can articulate are symptoms of the core problem under the surface.
Thinking about the problem is an important step. How you define the problem will dictate the solution.
Prioritized the problem:
Which one is the most disruptive to your business. There are going to be a bunch right now.
Try to pick no more than 5 as the top priority at a given time.
Note/Tip:
If you are familiar with a business model canvas you can map your problems to the different parts of the business model canvas. You can also do this with other tools like a supply chain/value chain, strategy map or a SWOT etc.
How To Start 4: Solutions Development
Once you have mapped out the baseline and the problems then you can start to think about solutions. At this point no solution is a bad idea. The goal is to develop a few different ideas/solutions no matter how crazy.
Really challenge your self to think big and completely re imagine your business.
This is not the time for “this is how we have always done it”.
What is a creative way for you to get through the next few weeks and what are you big ideas about how your industry will need to change or have to be run going forward?
Every industry has been disrupted and every industry is reinventing itself and the rules are being rewritten and will continue to be rewritten.
Come up with at least 3 big, “crazy” ideas.
DO NOT EDIT YOUR SELF!
All ideas are welcome from anyone.
The odds of you guessing the best solution on your first idea are very very slim. So think about a few for each of your priority problems.
The goal isn’t right or perfect or specific is it ideas. Ideas beget ideas and creativity.
Think about how a change in an operational process is going to change the customer experience or vice versa.
Think about your ideas and solutions in the context of the whole business.
One solutions might need a series of smaller changes and innovations too:
If you have a new to go service do you need to redesign/create a pick-up window?
How To Start 5: Try/Test. Learn. Iterate
All your ideas/solutions are good guesses. They are hypothesis of how to fix the problem(s). Once you have ideas you need to test them. You want to find, fast, low risk, low cost tests that you can try out your idea. The goal is to find out if it is feasible or not quickly and at a low cost. If it is feasible you want to learn quickly what would be needed to go from your test or prototyped version to scale and a product.
The paper test: Low cost and fast learning - it just costs pen and paper
For any idea you want to try first on pen and paper. It is low fidelity but you can quickly process ideas and check if they are feasible or worth the effort. You will also be able to tell what it would take to create a trial run to test the idea.
Like in how to start 1 map out the new process and the new customer experience - Highlight and list out what the new process or customer experience would need to execute the new change - ie do you now need to-go packaging?
Do the math: Back of the envelope, if the idea successful could you make money?
Design your test
When you pick something to try and test you need to design that test. The goal is to do something low risk and lower cost to learn if it is feasible and or would work.
Try one thing at a time. Remember back to science class you want to test your hypothesis and you want to control the study and limit the number of compounding variables or factors.
Have a clear limit - I will try for so many days, or so many customers, or we are going to order 10 and see how long they take to sell and how hard they are to sell.
Whatever you choose to do make sure you have built the test and captured the information needed to:
Make a go / no-go decision - should we stick with this or not and why. You should have some type of data or reasoning. It should be opinion.
Check the math: don’t assume because it worked or customers bought it etc. that it is financially feasible. Check the math.
Note: You aren’t trying to design perfect scientific studies but you should be doing a test that you are learning something from so you can make a decision or know how to improve your idea to make it viable.
Learn & Iterate
Keep track of what you are learning revisit the information from the previous steps and iterate.
Note:
Ideally you are moving through the idea, try, learn, decide, iterate loop quickly. Speed does matter. You are trying to learn fast and cheap because you have a burn rate and only so much money to invest in trying ideas.
How To Start 6: Decide & Go Forward.
Make decisions on what seem like it is working and go forward.
It is okay to change course. You can always change your mind as you move forward.
You are on an innovation journey.
You take your best guess, try it out in a low risk way, learn quickly, iterate your ideas and make new ones, try again, and repeat.
“I know 99 ways not to make a light bulb.”
“I learned in my start up was that we were like sharks, if we stopped we would die. It was better for us to take a guess, even if it was in the completely wrong direction, try it and learn fast that we are going the wrong way. At least then we knew something that didn’t work and better off than if we stayed still.”
“Getting a no is much better than getting a maybe or a I don’t know. Try to get to a no or yes as fast as possible. ”
The above outlines of steps is a generic guide based on Brian Mullen’s years of experience working in innovation and studying innovaiton methods. If you are looking for a more detailed guide or to dive in deeper. Brian recomends to start looking at the using Design Sprints. It focuses on moving forward quickly.
If you are looking for a more detailed process of how to rapidly innovate check out “Sprint” by Jake Knapp.
