What new product or service could you invent that would completely change your customers’ lives? How could you disrupt your entire sector?
This practical workshop takes you through an innovation process, helping you to identify the clichés that exist in your sector and giving you the tools and time to redefine them. The workshop provides techniques to disrupt those clichés, generate genuine customer insights, turn opportunities into ideas through proven ideation methods, create a coherent concept and then articulate that concept.
The workshop shows you how to realise a new product or service through a lean process of prototyping and iteration and we discuss case studies each step of the way.
Find out why focus groups are not design research. Find out why the average brainstorm gives ideation a bad name and find out how to make your own innovation processes have tangible business outcomes.
This workshop was ran at UX Cambridge in September 2013 and will be running again at the J. Boye conference in Århus, Denmark in November 2013.
Immerse, Imagine, Invent, Articulate: A framework for disruptive innovation
1. Immerse, Imagine, Invent
& Articulate
A framework for disruptive innovation
Presented by Paul-Jervis Heath at UX Cambridge on Wednesday 4 September 2013.
MH ModernHuman.
2. Hello!
• I’m most at home in a design studio. I’ve spent 15 years designing
services and digital products for big, international clients and small,
disruptive start-ups.
• I’m Principal of a design practice and innovation consultancy called
Modern Human; I lead the team there. I’m also Head of Innovation at the
University, while we establish an innovation centre.
• We use human-centred design to help businesses invent their future.
We’ve worked in lots of different sectors and done lots of different
design projects such as in-car information systems, smart home
appliances, concepts for retail stores of the future, established an
innovation practice at University of Cambridge, and lots of other things.
3. Today’s workshop squeezes a week
of our innovation intensive course
into 3 hours.
Inevitably, we’ve left quite a lot out
but I hope today will give you some
useful skills to take back to work and
a taste of that course.
🕅🕆
Photo credit
Flickr user andreaskopp - http://bit.ly/12yywna
17. What are we looking for?
• Workarounds: Quick, seemingly efficient solutions that address the symptoms of
a problem not the root cause.
• Values: People’s values play an important role in their motivations. What do they
value? What’s important to them? What’s not?
• Inertia: Situations in which customers act out of habit. How can you leverage or
break that inertia?
• Shoulds vs. Wants: People struggle with the tension between wants: things they
crave in the moment; and shoulds: things they know are good for them in the
long term. How can you help people move from where they are to where they
want to be?
18. Early Adopter
Early Majority
Late Majority
Laggards
Adapted from:
Diffusion of Innovations, Everett M Rogers. (1962).
Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore. (1991).
19. Early Adopter
Early Majority
Late Majority
Laggards
Adapted from:
Diffusion of Innovations, Everett M Rogers. (1962).
Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore. (1991).
20. What did you find out?
• Close your laptop and revert to low-tech methods for analysis! It moves you out
of your own normal situation.
• Write each observation on a post-it note (get some rectangular post-its for this).
Print out all the photos you took.
• Build an insight board of all of the post-its and photos.
• Affinity Sort: organise it into themes. Code your observations. This all lays the
groundwork for recognising insights.
• Observations are raw data. Insights are the interpretation of patterns in your
observations.
21. Look for the unexpected and ask, why?
• Don’t try and think about everything at once. Find a good place to start.
• Don’t focus on the obvious. There’s a risk that you just confirm your own
preconceptions and prejudices.
• Start with unexpected observations.
• Why is this a pattern? Why is it unexpected? Why is it meaningful?
22. Insight: A common failure of cleaning
floors is not a lack of water but an excess
of water that causes water to slop dirt
around.
Cliché: People use mops with water to
clean floors
Hypothesis: What if mops did not use
water
Opportunity: Provide people at home
[who] with a faster way to clean floors
[advantage] without using water [gap].
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Photo credit
Flickr user Chiot’s Run - http://bit.ly/16ZgcVw
23. Just your team?
• Recruit some users, or go out and find them guerrilla style.
• Immerse yourselves: diary study, shadowing, contextual interviews.
• Analyse the findings; look for the opportunities.
24. … or, involving everyone.
• Train & Facilitate: Teach others how to be the researchers. Have them go
out and immerse themselves through contextual research. Work with
them to structure the study and get together to analyse the findings and
insights.
• Open: Ask people to submit their own observations and insights on a
challenge using an Open Innovation platform. At Modern Human use
our own platform to manage innovation challenges for our clients.
27. 3 questions:
1. What do you want to disrupt?
2. What are the clichés?
3. What are your disruptive hypotheses?
Adapted from:
Disrupt: Think the unthinkable to spark transformation
in you business, 2010, Luke Williams.
28. What do you want to disrupt?
• How do you meaningfully differentiate this product or service from
everyone else in the same space?
• What situation are you going to challenge?
• For example,
-
This is an area where profit performance is average – it really should be more successful than it is.
-
This is a category where growth is slow and everything seems the same.
-
It boils down to… “How can we disrupt the <category> by delivering an expected solution”
Adapted from:
Disrupt: Think the unthinkable to spark transformation
in you business, 2010, Luke Williams.
29. Wii: How Nintendo
challenged everyone’s
perceptions of Video Games.
🕅🕆🕇🕋
Photo credit
Flickr user lincolnblues - http://bit.ly/1dC6LBm
30. Searching for clichés
📦
Product
Interaction
Pricing
Adapted from:
Disrupt: Think the unthinkable to spark transformation
in you business, 2010, Luke Williams.
31. Forming a disruptive hypothesis
🔄
Invert
Scale
Deny
Adapted from:
Disrupt: Think the unthinkable to spark transformation
in you business, 2010, Luke Williams.
36. Let’s try it out.
🕔 30-mins
Open the briefing pack, read the contents.
•
•
What disruptive intervention could you make?
•
How could you invert, deny or scale those clichés? Try inverting, denying or
scaling each of your clichés.
•
What would be your disruptive hypotheses? Identify the strongest 3 as your
disruptive hypothesis.
•
Tell us about it! Take the rest of the room through your thinking in a 5-minute
presentation.
What are the clichés in that industry, and about that experience? Generate 12-18
cliches about that experience.
38. Quantity of ideas
people come up with
in a brainstorm
x2
Quantity of
ideas people
come up when
working alone
Source:
Does Group Participation When Using Brainstorming Facilitate or Inhibit
Creative Thinking? Administrative Science Quarterly. Taylor, Berry & Block, 1958.
40. “ You can discover more about
a person in an hour of play
than in a year of conversation.”
– Plato: Greek Philosopher, Mathematician & Student Of Socrates
42. Rapid Ideation
What?
•
One reason teams end up with under-developed ideas is that we stick with the first good idea we
have, rather than taking the time to explore complementary approaches.
•
This game combats that pattern by forcing us to generate lots of ideas in a short period of time.
•
Take 8 sticky notes
•
You have 5 minutes from when I say “go” to sketch 6 to 8 ideas.
•
We’ll play 4 rounds.
•
After each round I’ll ask you to present your ideas to the group very briefly (2 minutes each).
•
The idea in each round is to either generate new ideas, build on your own ideas or build on ideas of other
people.
Source:
Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rulebreakers
and changemakers. 2010. Gray, Brown and Macanufo.
44. Quickly building on ideas
What?
•
In a space visible to the players, write the topic around which you need to generate
ideas and draw a quick sketch of it.
•
•
•
Take your set of index cards and silently write an idea on each card.
•
Continue this process of brain writing and passing cards to the right until there are
various ideas on each card.
Pass the first of your ideas cards to the person on your right.
When you receive a card, read the card and think of it as an “idea stimulation” card.
Add an idea inspired by what they just read or to enhance the idea and then pass
again to their right.
Source:
Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rulebreakers
and changemakers. 2010. Gray, Brown and Macanufo.
46. Interesting Combinations of Attributes
Step 1:
•
As a team decide on two sets of attributes that define a matrix. E.g.
Source:
Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rulebreakers
and changemakers. 2010. Gray, Brown and Macanufo.
47. Interesting Combinations of Attributes
Step 2:
•
Populate the matrix creating a grid of possible new combinations
Step 3:
•
Do a quick sketch of each idea that comes out of those combinations.
Source:
Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rulebreakers
and changemakers. 2010. Gray, Brown and Macanufo.
48. When you get stuck, go in new directions
Force Connections
Blend ideas
Blend benefits
49. Let’s do it.
•
•
•
•
🕔 30-mins
Use one or more of the ideation techniques we’ve discussed to create a concept.
Generate as many ideas as possible in 45-minutes.
Do not critique the ideas now.
Practice divergent thinking.
51. Let’s try it.
•
•
•
•
🕔 15-mins
Use the How, Now, Wow matrix as a structure to critique your ideas.
Not all ideas have to go on the matrix, feel free to discard ideas at this stage.
This is the stage to critique your ideas.
Practice convergent thinking.
52. Just your team?
• Decide what you’re going to disrupt. Identify the clichés. Form your
disruptive hypotheses.
• Use the insight from research as stimulus to your ideation sessions.
• Divergent thinking is the key so run several rounds of an ideation game.
• Don’t give up until you’ve got more than 100 ideas.
• Rate the ideas, select the best.
53. or, involving everyone?
How many?
• 20-30: run a series of codesign workshops inviting people into the
studio to
• More than that: Run a large, open codesign workshop or idea jam (like a
hack day for ideas).
-
Hire a suitable space, invite lots of people, form them into teams and introduce the challenge brief then
let them go for it.
-
Divergent idea generation and convergent idea selection.
-
Discuss at half-way point. Pitch at the end.
56. Refine ideas into concepts
• What is the concept?
• Who is the primary end user?
• Why should they care? What are the benefits?
• How will this idea deliver those benefits?
57. Define your concept
Illustrate the concept through a combination of…
• storyboards that describes the concept
• diagrams explaining how it might work
• high-fidelity mock-ups of the concept
58. Use this Slide to Make Bold Statements!
Early stage prototyping
provides validated learning.
59. Experimenting with prototypes.
• Use prototypes to learn about user behaviour with your concept
• Validates emergent service against business objectives and goals
• Validates Concepts with Users
• Use Scenario Testing, Concept Probes, Cognitive Walkthroughs with Real
Users, Mock environments, Roleplay.
60. Iterate and refine.
• Iteration is vital for success
• Treat the concept as a hypothesis not as a definitive solution
• Learn everything you can
• Adapt to what you learn
• Refine the concept, refine the prototype
• Test Again
62. or, involving everyone?
• Facilitate: Do teams have time and skills to develop the concepts on
their own or with support from design practitioners?
• Dedicate the team: Can teams whose ideas show promise be given
dedicated time to incubate their ideas into concepts?
• Bring into a central team: Is it better to use a central design team to
develop the ideas into workable concepts?
65. Articulate the future state.
• Disruptive ideas can be hard for companies to adopt because they’re
disruptive – companies embrace disruptive ideas when they believe it
will deliver value.
• Identify and convince the stakeholders needed to take the solution to
the next level. Those who will allocate capital, technology and people.
• A longer pitch isn’t better. Constrain yourself to 9-minutes: 10 seconds to
grab their attention and 8min 50sec to hold it!
• Whether you use the structure on the next slide or not, it’s a useful
thought exercise.
66. Make them
believe
Build Tension
Create Empathy
Structure
The Status Quo
The Observations
The Story
The Insight
The Opportunity
The Analogy
Give them the turning point
Make it familiar
The Advantages
The Ethos
Make change appealing
Leave them on a high
Tell them what they don’t
know
The Solution
67. Just your team?
• Who are you pitching to? Find the right stakeholders and sponsors that
can make the concept happen.
• Pitch it. Support the pitch with concept material.
68. or, involving everyone?
• Lead up to a pitch day.
• There has to be a serious commitment to adopt new ideas beforehand.
• Have designers to act as mentors and coaches.
• Have the challenge teams pitch their ideas to a panel of the business’
stakeholders and decision makers.
• Give teams the pitch structure to help them (they might not be
professional pitchers).
• Select the best ideas to develop further.
70. ModernHuman.
🕅🕆🕇🕊
We love our ideas to spread. That’s why this
presentation is released under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license.
This license allows you and others to remix,
tweak, and build upon this work noncommercially. When you do you must
acknowledge us, Modern Human and license
any new creations under the identical terms.
When in doubt, just ask us. We won’t bite.
We use human-centred design to help
businesses invent their future. We’re a
design practice & innovation consultancy.
Find out more at http://modernhuman.co
Paul-Jervis Heath
paul@modernhuman.co
@pauljervisheath
🕅🕆
Photo credit
Flickr user andreaskopp - http://bit.ly/12yywna