Perspectives Blog

Innovation shouldn’t be restricted to an annual hackathon, but rather part of the way a company runs its business. Unprecedented access to data, open knowledge sharing and collaboration, and tools and philosophies to run business experiments are equipping teams to create more value, in more ways. The barriers to innovation are lower than ever.

But in this age of plenty, we see many organizations struggle to create new ideas and invent new value chains.

The key reason for the struggle is a misconception about innovation, and how to do it. If a company is confused about what innovation looks like, and how to organize teams around it, then the company may also assign the wrong people to innovation projects, at the wrong times, and create friction to getting their ideas out into the world. This effectively creates self imposed barriers to innovation.

A common but outdated approach is the traditional innovation funnel. In the very shape of funnels you sense confinement and a certain sense of circling around the same ideas. Instead, companies should organize around a different process for the innovation teams — and a different shape. What you need isn’t a funnel, it’s an idea rocket.

The canonical wisdom of innovation is to start with lots of ideas. The top of the funnel is where boundless ideation occurs, and teams are encouraged in hackathons, innovation workshops, and Google design sprints to create many ideas. You probably can easily spout the canonical advice to encourage ideation:

• “there are no bad ideas”
• “quantity over quality”
• “Don’t worry about practicality or feasibility”

While granting that these maxims are useful, generating ideas for the top of the funnel creates a flashy beginning, setting the stage for ‘innovation theater’ but too often ends in stagnation instead of providing the avenue for innovation that is relevant and impactful.

Instead of sticking with the traditional innovation funnel, Helpfully has adopted and built upon the innovation rocket to ensure new ideas are sourced from customers, stakeholders, and market trends. Taking an idea rocket engine approach provides a paradigm shift to constantly uncover insights to inspire questions, guide decisions and seek deeper engagement centered around the needs of real people.

Here are the four stages to create an innovation rocket to increase successful outcomes. First, let’s start with the overview, then we’ll dive into more details for each stage.

The innovation rocket method starts with the tip. The tip of the rocket is a fine point. Once initial energy flowing in the right direction, fire up the combustion phase, trying to generate and combine ideas. Then use the nozzle phase to narrow in on the best ideas through a more intense analysis of proposals against market and user needs. Which naturally leads to a culling process that uncovers a single winning idea that is scaled up in the expander phase.

1. Destination - Describe the compelling future state and crisply define the parameters of a solution. A clear destination helps the team describe their objectives. Use research to find insights about people and their behaviors, understanding how they do things today, and what levers can be pulled to affect change tomorrow.
   
   In this stage, insights gathered through research will inevitably uncover areas needing innovation. This requires challenging norms and standards to get beyond platitudes.
   
   
2. Combustion - Inject the insights from the brief into a tight window of time and with a tight-knit cross-functional team, and see the sparks fly. Techniques like ‘combine and refine’ and ‘lift and shift’ from other industries are excellent ways to knock solution concepts into one another. You may be surprised to find that the most innovative solution is the most obvious idea. Just because something is obvious doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea - in fact, it can often be the exact opposite.
   
   
3. Nozzle - Place the solution you have identified as a possible answer under the pressure of experimentation and testing that can give hints of product market fit (PMF). Do research iterations to discover how to improve the fit, either with product features, positioning, or nicheing down even further to a more specific target. If not, go back and look at it from another angle.
   
   
4. Expander  -  Once you’ve gone through initial validation, it is important to ensure that your product is tested in the market with real people who have real needs. One of the main reasons startups fail is a lack of product market fit (PMI). Conducting experiments to find initial traction, and grow customer awareness and satisfaction are key for the success of an idea. An initial PMI is not a cut and dried deal. Think of this stage as a continuum - a stage that needs continued refinement and assessment.
   
   Essential to the success of this stage is validation that the problem identified and your solution are in fact relevant and needed in the market and by the relevant people.
   
   A few indicators of success are as follows: are users excited by the product? Would they be willing to pay? Would they be disappointed if it went away? Is there organic growth (unpaid growth, e.g. sales driven by word of mouth or referrals). Are people willing to use a beta (minimum viable product) version? This can be done by surveys and interview, landing pages and mockups, A/B testing, email list subscriptions, and presales where you see how many people are willing to buy into the product before they have their hands on the finished version.

Summary

We believe this structured methodology, along with its own set of feedback mechanisms and gates, enables greater flexibility and sustainability for organizations to innovate. We have made the innovation rocket work across varied industries and across business cycles, when supply, demand and economic conditions dictate alternate innovation framing.

Deeper customer engagements and operational analytics that reveal ongoing insights from interactions and transactions open doors to new ideas and a ‘lab to market pathway’ to create innovative products and services.

With an ever increasing speed of change, companies need to embrace innovation in market pull models that serve as a gravitational well, accelerating insights and co-creating technology and service innovations.  The idea rocket model embraces a start-up mentality — risk taking, collaboration, communication and diverse thinking – all with a lot of forward propulsion.

Helpfully’s team of experts helps you determine the next new thing that puts you ahead of the competition.  The idea engine provides a way to make innovation part of every task, to constantly monitor data and gather insights. Our team helps define the fuzzy front end of projects and roll-up our sleeves to discover the right problems to solve and products or services to create that meet your and your audience’s needs.  The rocket engine helps operationalize the process to continuously iterate and improve.