Changes in business and technology are occurring at a rapid pace while companies simultaneously fight to free themselves from the residual effects of the pandemic. Companies and teams must invest in innovation not only to stay ahead but to simply survive in today’s extremely fast-paced environment. Utilizing innovation exercises and innovation training can help create impactful, powerful results. 

A McKinsey study of over 200 organizations across industries found that 90% of surveyed executives said they anticipate the effects of COVID-19 to fundamentally alter how they conduct business in the next five years. 85% of executives said that they expect the pandemic will also impact their customers’ needs indefinitely. Innovation is the critical component companies need to heal from the current crisis, transcend its lasting effects, and adequately meet their customers’ needs.

“The truth is that there is no one ‘true path’ to innovation, no silver bullets and no shortcuts. There are, however, effective strategies that managers can pursue to dramatically increase their chances of success.” -Greg Satell, Mapping Innovation

In this article, we’ll explore five innovation exercises that you can incorporate with your team or organization to spur innovation and get creative juices flowing. There is no one way to approach innovation. Explore what methods work best for your team by applying these innovation exercises and strategies.

1. Group Brainstorming

This innovation exercise is great for getting the entire team involved, regardless of what project or role each team member has. Group brainstorming can take place in person using sticky notes and a whiteboard or wall or virtually for distributed teams using a virtual whiteboard tool like MURAL (and digital stickies). Have everyone write down any challenges they are facing on sticky notes and tape them to a wall or create them in a MURAL template. Next, everyone walks around the room and stops at each sticky note to add an idea with their own sticky note that can potentially solve that problem or challenge. For best results, have everyone write an idea on every sticky note and build upon what others said. This exercise increases productivity and creativity as employees have the chance to interact with individuals from different areas of expertise and perspectives, which helps spark new ideas to solve challenges. It also promotes full participation without anyone feeling self-conscious about sharing their ideas. 

2. Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures is a framework for facilitation that consists of 33 microstructures designed to build trust and enhance cooperation and communication between teammates. Incorporating Liberating Structures into in-person and remote team collaboration strengthens communication and improves attention management so you can do exceptional work as a team. When there is equal participation amongst the group, you get the best performance from everyone, i.e., you are able to create meaningful solutions together. Check out our library of Liberating Structures templates for MURAL and Miro.

3. Mind Maps

This innovation exercise can be done either alone or in a group setting. Start by writing a general idea in the middle of a blank piece of paper. From there, begin making connections that build off the main point and write them down. For example, if your idea or project is developing a mobile app, a connection that might branch out is Android vs. iOS. Continue building on each connection to generate a stream of new ideas. If you find your team is struggling to come up with connections, try to reframe the main idea and start a new mind map to get a new perspective. The output will be many new ideas to start working with.

4. R&D

Research and development is a series of innovation activities to develop new products and services or improve existing ones. This is a reverse version of Group Brainstorming (or standard innovation process). Instead of starting with problems and brainstorming solutions based on them, encourage your team first to examine the latest technological developments and then ideate their application to your organization’s challenges. This is the flow in many engineering industries, where technology comes first. The Design Sprint process is effective for exploring R&D and solving big challenges quickly. The 5-day structure allows you to align team members and key stakeholders to solve a problem, rapidly prototype and test potential solutions, avoid costly delays in the innovation process, as well as decrease the time to bring the idea to market. Learn more about how and when to incorporate a Desing Sprint into your innovation journey here

.

5. Template Exercises

Exploring innovative ideas can be daunting. Where do you start? How do you bring an idea to fruition? We’ve created a library of interactive and customizable digital templates for you to use with your teams to ignite and accelerate innovation. The templates are created for MURAL and Miro, digital whiteboard tools that allow teams to work together async and in real-time in a shared space. Each template serves a different purpose in your innovation process. For example, the How to Remix Anything Template helps you vary your points of inspiration and approach to achieve a different outcome for an existing idea. The Beyond the Prototype Template helps you overcome roadblocks in innovation by navigating slumps and maintaining momentum. Explore the full library of free resources here.

Innovation is more important than ever for companies to stay relevant in today’s economy. Stay ahead of the curve by utilizing various innovation exercises and implementing innovation training to incorporate effective strategies for your team to succeed.

Want to learn more about innovation training?

We can help! Voltage Control offers a range of options for innovation training. We know that no two teams are alike. Companies are complex, with their own unique set of structures and company culture. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs.

Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Contact us if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

The post Innovation Exercises: 5 Ways to Spark Innovation in Your Team appeared first on Voltage Control.

As the workforce begins to return to (a version of) its pre-pandemic normalcy, advancements in business are happening faster than ever before. Teams and businesses must keep up with our world’s fast-paced environment in order to survive and stand out amongst the competition. The key to survival is investing in innovation. Explore disruptive innovation and/or sustaining innovation in your organization to create impactful and unconventional results and outshine competitors. 

“Managers are often told they must ‘innovate or die’ but are given little useful guidance on how to go about it.” -Greg Satell, Mapping Innovation

In this article, we’ll explore the difference between disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation and how to incorporate them into your own organization. 

There are variances between disruptive innovation vs. sustaining innovation, but there is also a time and place for both. Disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation don’t need to be alternative to one another, but rather can and should be leveraged as complementary measures.

Disruptive Innovation

According to the developer of the disruptive innovation theory Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation means to reinvent a technology, business model, or simply invent something new altogether. Disruptive innovation generates new products, markets, and values in order to disrupt existing ones. Company examples of disruptive innovation are Waze, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and Doordash. This type of innovation drastically changes and/or improves a product or service in ways that the market did not expect. Disruptive innovation is accomplished through a combination of uncovering new categories of customers and lowering costs and enhancing quality in the existing market. This is done by utilizing new technologies and business models, and/or exploiting old technologies in new ways. Disruptive innovation is about identifying areas that haven’t been fully explored previously.

Sustaining Innovation

In comparison to disruptive innovation, sustaining innovation seeks to improve existing products and processes. It does not create new markets, but rather develops existing ones with better value. Sustaining innovation happens on an incremental basis, often in response to customer or market demand, or technology improvements. Sustaining innovation occurs within pre-existing markets that customers and consumers have demonstrated they value already. An example of sustaining innovation is the smartphone market – every year, cell phone manufacturers (i.e. Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Amazon, LG, etc.) release updated and improved products to meet consumer demand and to integrate new technology. Maintaining open channels for feedback and communication allow businesses to constantly improve and provide greater value to customers and the market. 

A Time and Place for Both

The “innovator’s dilemma” is the choice a company faces when it has to choose between holding onto an existing market by doing the same thing but better (sustaining innovation), or capturing new markets by embracing new technologies and adopting new business models (disruptive innovation).

However, many companies today recognize it doesn’t need to be simply one or the other when it comes to disruptive innovation vs. sustaining innovation. In order to achieve cutting-edge innovation within a company while also creating long-term growth, both disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation should be included in the overarching strategy to achieve a combination of revolution and evolution. In other words, there is a time and place for both disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation. They do not necessarily need to be alternative to one another, but can and should both be leveraged. Great benefits will also be realized when the two are integrated well. For example, Apple utilizes both disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation through producing net new products and services, while also constantly improving upon and updating their existing ones.

Identify Your Needs

Organizations should be very intentional about their various needs when it comes to disruptive innovation vs. sustaining innovation and utilize each accordingly, with purpose. 

Larger, established companies tend to be more successful when it comes to sustaining innovation. They have the resources, time, and an existing audience to be able to rely on more incremental change. More agile companies (often smaller companies and/or start-ups) tend to have the advantage when dealing with disruptive innovation. They may struggle to compete with larger corporations in more established markets but may be able to successfully challenge them in a new marketplace.

Christensen advises managers to follow four rules to avoid falling into the trap of trying to force disruptive innovation to happen the same way as sustaining innovation:

• Give responsibility for disruptive technologies to organizations whose customers need them so that resources will naturally flow to them.
• Set up a separate organization small enough to get excited by small gains.
• Plan for failure. Think of your initial efforts at commercializing a disruptive technology as a learning opportunity.
• Don’t count on breakthroughs. Move ahead early and find the market for the current attributes of the technology.

If you are a large organization that is looking to create disruptive innovation, consider finding a way to try it separately and autonomously from the main part of the business. This way, potential progress isn’t unnecessarily inhibited by any existing resources, processes, habits, or priorities. If you are a small organization that wants to sustain innovation, utilize your existing customer base for feedback and data on the most impactful improvements you can make to provide greater value.

Viima, the innovation platform, explains why both disruptive and sustaining innovation are important but must also be approached with the right intent: 

“If all focus solely lies on developing sustaining innovation, being replaced by disruptive innovation is a bleak question of when, not if. Especially for large companies, investing in disruptive innovation is always necessary for long-term success, although it probably doesn’t pay off for a while. If you only start investing when a disruptive technology has already gained significant momentum, you not only have to invest increasingly more to catch up with the competition but also do so from a base of declining revenue for your existing business, which usually proves to be impossible. Keep in mind, however, that moderation is key. If all attention is simply steered towards disruptive innovation, revenue and profit will usually start to decline, which in turn increases the risk profile dramatically.”

There are massive benefits to both disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation approaches as well as many negatives to neglecting innovation altogether. Sustaining innovation is typically an incremental approach with long-term growth benefits, whereas disruptive innovation (which can also take time) has the opportunity to create new values and markets for something consumers didn’t know they needed, wanted, or were missing.

There is no silver bullet to innovation, but utilizing resources like innovation training will help provide insight into effective strategies that teams can pursue to dramatically increase their chances of success.

Here at Voltage Control, we help enterprises disrupt, sustain and accelerate innovation through custom workshops that transform the way your organization works. If your organization is facing innovation challenges, let’s chat about your specific situation and how we can help.

The post Disruptive Innovation vs. Sustaining Innovation: a Time & Place for Both appeared first on Voltage Control.

Everyone wants to innovate and promote innovation in some capacity these days. After all, the competitive landscape in most industries is only getting, for lack of better words, more competitive, Innovation keeps organizations in front of the curve and well-positioned to maintain long-term success. Create and sustain a culture of innovation for teams and individuals in your company to streamline growth and prosperity.

In this article, we’ll evaluate 5 strategies that will help you implement an innovative culture throughout your team. Everyone from senior leadership to entry-level hires is essential to driving innovation. Each person has a unique perspective and therefore can bring new, different ideas to the table regardless of title or seniority level.

“Innovation is like potential energy in physics. It represents the intrinsic creativity and wisdom of a team – the raw potential a team uses to succeed.” -Tom Counsell

Many companies try to build an innovative culture by stocking the company fridge, having a ping pong table and some company-sponsored happy hours, and a flexible work from home policy. That’s not to say those aren’t all great perks to have (and probably help with team bonding and employee happiness) but alone they won’t create and sustain a true culture of innovation. Although there’s no single “right” or sure way to drive innovation, here are some strategies you can apply to create and sustain a culture of innovation at your organization regardless of industry or vertical.

Innovation Strategies

1. Utilize Innovation Training

Innovation training is an essential process for almost every company to implement in their workflow and operations. Not only does it teach leaders (and teams) creative ways of thinking and working that push individuals to go beyond the status quo,  (and therefore improve the bottom line and result in more satisfied customers), but it also creates better employee engagement and satisfaction. Innovation training will create and sustain a culture of innovation, along with helping teams and organizations keep up with our world’s increasing fast-paced environment. Successful teams want to see their company address market needs and evolve with our current times.

2. Empower Your Team

The word “innovation” is making its way into more and more mission statements, company core values, and even the corporate C-Suites (aka the rise of the Chief Innovation Officer). As more organizations adopt innovation as a core value and key concept, it’s important to not only mention “innovation” on your website but create a real culture where your employees feel empowered to think independently and find new ways to solve problems. Great leaders make smart decisions, but they shouldn’t do it all alone – empower employees to make decisions on an individual and team basis, rather than concentrating decision-making authority at the top. This will help create and sustain a culture of innovation. Also – ask for feedback. Asking your team’s input and critiques will help ensure that ideas are aligned. The effort will ultimately empower your workforce to offer more ideas and ask more questions, leading to increased all-around productivity. Collaboration and diversity of thought are at the heart of every innovative company. And if you are looking for some ways to spark innovation with your team, check out these 5 innovation exercises.

FREE DOWNLOAD

Get Our Find Your Alignment

Determine how your idea can be shifted or re-positioned to connect with and support business objectives.

Get It Now

3. Define (or Redefine) Your Innovation Success Metrics

Measuring the success of innovation and ideas is much more difficult (and different) than measuring something more definite, such as the return on advertising spend. Therefore, first understand that new initiatives can’t be expected to perform at the same level as other activities that have been utilized for a long time. Give new ideas time and a chance to prove themselves. Create and define metrics specific to the innovation process rather than reassigning success metrics from other programs. This goes for people too – create a safe space for experimentation. For example, allow time and space for team brainstorming and discovery; potentially even consider aligning employee goals with innovation vs. hard sales or profit targets and understand failing is okay. Encourage your team to be bold and push the boundaries. If you’re not failing, you may not be innovating much. Focus on what you can learn rather than becoming focused on first-time success. Creating this space for your organization is another way to sustain a culture of innovation.

4. Be Agile

To truly create and sustain a culture of innovation, don’t be afraid to take action on innovative ideas quickly. This isn’t to necessarily say every idea is a great one or every new product concept should go directly to prototyping, but make informed decisions as quickly as possible (whether the decision is to invest more time and resources in an idea, or not) in order to keep learning and moving forward. 

5. Learn to Facilitate Innovation With Us

Innovation facilitation and training can feel intimidating. We offer expert training to help individuals, teams, and companies build the skills they need to design magical meetings, transform meeting culture, and run exceptional events, both in-person and virtual. Having an unbiased third-party perspective can make innovation training organized and engaging, and help create, promote and sustain a culture of innovation on your team.

Does your company need Innovation Training? We can help!

Voltage Control offers a range of options for innovation training. We know that no two teams are alike. Companies are complex with their own unique set of structures and company culture. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs.

Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

The post 5 Strategies to Promote an Innovative Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

When several students at Davidson College in North Carolina pitched an idea to design and teach their own course, the small liberal arts school was willing to create a space to test this kind of learning against traditional education. It started with Davidson’s first foray into a process for innovation, one focused in part on soliciting ideas from the unique perspectives of current students and young alumni.

The prompt:  “When you look at your education, what is or was missing and why? What do or did you need Davidson to do differently?” The goal: Help Davidson close the gap between current and future students. At least one of the responses was a bit surprising.

“We had a group of students pitch an idea to run their own course,” explained Kristen Eshleman, Director of Innovation Initiatives. “They wanted to remove the layer of authority and change the power dynamics present in traditional teaching and learning. In many classes, they argued, they simply didn’t feel they were an equal partner in the learning process. They wanted to test a different kind of model.” Kristen explained that the students worked with a faculty member to develop a student-run course. Six students would design their own course and deliver the learning themselves.

“They were miserable,” she said of the students, who figured out as much about half-way through the course. “In part, because they realized along the line that the novice-expert relationship is deeply valuable. And they are a lot of ways in which our faculty could do it differently, but to not have them deeply engaged throughout was a bad experience” for the students. “They all capitulated at the end and said, ‘No, we really miss the faculty.’”

Experimentation is about research and development and finding ways to innovate that are practical and useful to the Davidson community. This one was a failure, Kristen said, but they produced good learnings. Some elements of the experience informed later projects “but we would never do something exactly like that again because it proved that the novice/expert relationship is critical to deep learning.”

Building innovation

Going forward, Davidson’s innovation process is focused on finding the adjacent possibles that can address external change pressures and develop good options for the college to exercise in the future. Small liberal arts colleges like Davidson face significant headwinds around changing demographics, rising costs, and technology-enabled competition. We can’t predict the future, but we can become more adaptive by focusing on what Dave Snowden calls “the evolutionary potential of the present.”

“The question we are asking is, how do we create agile feedback loops so that we are able to understand, in near real-time, what our culture needs and then put those innovations into play to see what moves the needle.”

In talking with Kristen about the challenges facing higher ed, she highlighted ways in which this small school is adopting some of the best practices in start-up culture focused on institutional innovation–not something you would expect to see on a picturesque campus of higher education founded in 1837. “Davidson decided to be proactive about change,” Kristen said of the steps toward innovation. But there is no blueprint for innovation. “Each institution has its own complexities and context. Whatever you design for innovation in your context probably won’t map exactly the same way in another context. What Davidson needs out of innovation is not the same as what the community college down the street needs out of innovation.” 

Davidson recognized a potential model for innovation several years into the college’s edX initiative, which began in 2012. For Kristen, edX was an experiment to understand how online learning might help us do things we could not do otherwise. Kristen said that through the process the institution learned that they “had a much greater appetite for risk-taking and failing forward than we realized. With edX, we had to work in a lean style, because we didn’t then and still do not have an online learning team on campus. Our faculty and staff had to find the time and mindset to pull it all together quickly. Being in that startup mode made us realize we can be agile when we need to, and we are pretty good at it.”

Having worked in startups prior to joining Davidson, Kristen was familiar with this way of working. Seeing how the college was able to tackle EdX also made her and others realize the institution’s potential for innovation. “For us, it was a model that just confirmed Davidson is a place that can do R&D really well; it can do startup mentality really well. And if we can get the institution to value an R&D process and formalize it, then we can invite more from our community into it. And that’s basically what we ended up doing.”

One way in which Davidson has tackled this is through an open, transparent, and accountable innovation process called Idea Trek, which takes in ideas from anyone connected to the college. Kristen and a small team first conduct opportunity validations (two-six weeks from submission, depending on the complexity of the idea) and if an idea proceeds to pilot her team works to identify the necessary resources. As part of Davidson’s four-year strategic vision, the ideas that flow through this innovation process are considered in the long-term strategies. At the moment, ideas include everything from adding hydroponic dehumidifiers to a new program in the Publishing Arts, and a request to move Spring Break back a week to align more with other colleges. 

When Kristen and I talked she spoke about Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” and how he explains that most innovation isn’t about moon shots and breakthroughs, but rather you have to innovate along adjacent possibles, or those things in the present which are actually feasible. Kristen explained that the more you explore adjacent possibles, the more new potential futures open up around you. 

When I talk about this same concept I tend to use the term “analogous inspiration.” There is so much out there that can inspire us and push our thinking in new ways. And that’s one of the most effective parts of the design sprint. As people start to present ideas you can see how they’re inspired by sketches and solutions others bring to the table. You can watch as people are inspired by conversations they are having how their ideas adapt and change in real-time. 

Kristen said one of these adjacent possibles for Davidson includes partnering with an outside entity to address a gap identified by alumni and students and offer “immersive, high-impact learning experiences.” She said the college has to look at what is practical and realistic. This idea is currently in pilot. “And that’s what I’m getting at with the adjacent possible. We believe we have a model that addresses a significant pain point for our graduates and are now testing this hypothesis, within our policies and within our constraints.” 

Measuring Innovation

I’m continuously curious about how to measure innovation. So, I asked Kristen how she does this at Davidson and how they harness learnings.

“In the simplest ways, we are tracking the number of ideas and the diversity of voices represented – we’d like to see growth in the number and range of ideas from a broad swath of the college community. Within pilots, we are doing full program evaluations.”

But in general, Kristen has that entrepreneurial attitude about innovation. She’s most interested in accounting for the learnings and not for traditional ROI. This includes debriefs, focus groups, and being aware of serendipitous ideas that originate from each learning. 

Kristen said for higher ed she defines innovation as “an exercise in empathy, with those we are designing for at the center of decision-making.” How perfectly put that is that? Indeed, empathy and innovation do go hand in hand. It’s worth considering a marriage of the two the next time you’re designing a sprint or searching for the next best product.

The post Innovating Beyond the Books appeared first on Voltage Control.

Kim Jenkins is changing the discussion about the fashion industry and how its social, cultural, and historical influences show up in our daily lives and determine how we “fashion” ourselves.

She is a lecturer, researcher, and consultant that specializes in identifying why we wear what we wear as influenced across the intersections of psychology, race, gender, and economics. Kim believes that there is a purpose and meaning in how we dress and put ourselves together.

What we choose to wear, she says, is an external expression of the sense of purpose we have in our lives. It’s a topic she is passionate about exploring as a way to foster greater understanding and connection.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Kim about how the concept of race influences fashion, why it matters, and how open-mindedly considering our own and others’ fashion choices can teach us compassion.

Conversation as a vehicle for connection

Kim approaches her work with what she refers to as a broad perspective of fashion: “I scale-out into the bigger picture — to the way we think about things, the way we connect. How we can draw connections between how we present ourselves and put ourselves together? And, how that aligns with our identity, the way we see ourselves, how we wish to be seen, and how we’re just always working on ourselves.”

Contrary to popular belief that the fashion industry is navel-gazing, Kim is more curious about co-mingling with communities outside of the industry to share her insights. She thinks that’s where awareness and change can indeed happen. By starting conversations around fashion choices and what they communicate (or what we may think they communicate), we can build bridges with others to come to better understandings.

“I’ve always been interested in innovation, vision, genius, and productivity. All those conversations that are definitely not discussed in fashion studies…”

Talking about how to put diversity at the forefront of fashion and understanding how it impacts the “Western beauty ideal” is crucial to fostering innovation, Kim says. It is essential to understand the history and development of Western beauty ideals because it is a reason there are marginalized cultures and racial bodies, people who don’t fit in the “whiteness” of the structure.

This is where separateness emerges and where conversation as a vehicle to understand people, even when it’s difficult, is crucial among varying perspectives. Otherwise, judgment without connection continues to fuel secludedness. Kim says: “I’m interested in correcting a lot of those misinterpretations and enlightening anyone to the fact that fashion and conversations about dress have depth. It has a more profound meaning than we consider.”

How race influences fashion

Kim identified that at the heart of “separateness” is the concept of race and how we relate to it. And how we identify with race shows up in how we dress.

“Race is a social construction designed a couple centuries ago to empower one group of people over another…We have “racialized identities” — people who, generation after generation, are told (and then believe) that they are a certain race. We see the vestiges of it in the news in terms of discrimination and how people feel when they see someone who looks different than them.”

Identifying the importance of this connection, Kim decided to create her class at Parsons School of Design — “Fashion and Race.” The field of fashion studies is relatively new (only formed in the last 20 years; nothing specifically regarding “fashion theory” was published until the late ‘90s). Because the field is young and evolving, there is still a lot to uncover about what fashion means on an individual and cultural level and how it affects the way we view and interact with one another.

“It’s a nascent field, and we talk about things like the intersection of fashion and psychology, the intersection of fashion and politics, the intersection of fashion and war…” Kim said. “We also talk about fashion and the shaping or construction of one’s identity. But, one thing I notice that my fellow scholars weren’t addressing (and probably with good reason because it’s a very tender subject) is one key aspect of our identity. That is race.”

Race is an issue she believes is essential for people to address because it is one we all face, whether it’s acknowledged or not. “It would be negligent or foolish to pretend that our diverse group of students at Parsons School of Design doesn’t regularly confront the construct of race in various aspects of their life.”

The objective of Kim’s “Fashion and Race” course is to explore and address the constructed identities that emerge within a racialized context to gain access, visibility, and power. It critically-addresses the historically and socially-accepted standards of identity and value.

Social innovation

Kim took her teachings outside of the classroom when major clothing brands began taking notice of her work in the past year. She started to apply her expertise to consult and help companies identify their “blind spots” and broaden their visions to be more inclusive.

“I’m all about vision and representation, correcting misrepresentation and tapping into the ethos of a brand. What is the kernel of your identity? What is your vision and how can we broaden the vision together?…People think they’re being innovative or visionary and it’s just like the whitest space. It’s just this space that does not have a diverse group of ideas…”

Along with awareness of a need for more diversity within brands, the issue of cultural appropriation, or “cultural plagiarism,” as coined by scholar Minh-Ha Pham, is another timely and complicated topic. Still, Kim says, it’s one that is prevalent in the fashion industry and must be carefully considered.

“When you’re a group of oppressed or marginalized individuals and your material culture, style, food, music, clothing, or hairstyle is taken by someone who is enjoying power — that’s when this becomes a messy situation and where emotions get involved. People become angry and start putting up walls. At the heart of the matter, it’s about power-sharing and profit-sharing, as well as recognition, not misrepresentation. All of those factors are swirling around when people see someone who is in a position of privilege or power wearing something that belongs to a culture that is not their own natively.”

So what is the antidote? Dialogue. We can be too quick to assume the worst and judge other people, she says, rather than being willing to talk and learn. But when we open up the conversation, first with ourselves and then with others, we create space for understanding.

“I believe things can start to be ironed out through conversation. I’m a cultural optimist in that way. That’s what is at the heart of this work…How can we think through these things? What’s the bigger picture? How can we do things better? What’s a more efficient way to do things?”

Talk therapy

When we allow people to work out their ideas for a certain amount of time, it can be therapeutic, Kim says. That’s why she structures her work around dialogue and creates platforms for people to engage in it safely.

Whether facilitating discussions, challenging companies to consider and talk through the limitations of underrepresented classes, or expanding the narrative of fashion history to understand misrepresentation better, Kim leads with inclusivity and compassion to fuel innovation in the fashion industry and our society at large. How should this transformation be measured? Kim says by how it withstands pressure over time and how it improves people’s lives.

“Innovation is the gift of vision, the circumstance of resources, and a unique life experience to know what to do with those things.”

Kim pairs her own life experiences, her expertise, and a particular focus on conversation to create innovation. The power of education and open dialogue creates consideration and comprehension. It helps us to come closer together rather than further apart, something we need more of in our world today.

The post How Fashion Can Influence Social Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Braden Kelley started his career as an undergrad working for Symantec. As the internet became ubiquitous, Symantec enlisted him to establish a web presence to serve their customer support online. In the process, he found himself immersed in the world of innovation and design thinking as he worked with designers and customers in focus groups to uncover their needs. Inspired by this work, Braden returned to school for his MBA so he could fully embrace a career that allowed him to focus on providing new value for the customer.

Gaining more knowledge over the years, Braden realized he had contributions he thought would be valuable to the industry. After writing numerous articles, he eventually distilled his observations in two books: Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and Charting Change.

He shared with me his views on how companies can create a solid foundation for innovation and successfully move their ideas from invention to adoption.

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.”

Braden’s definition of innovation highlights some key distinctions. First, in order for an idea to be more than an invention, it must be widely adopted. Second, more than just being useful, an idea must be valuable and monetized at a point customers are willing to pay for it. Third, it must displace an existing solution providing so much value that customers readily change their habits. Products like the VCR, mp3 player and Gorilla Glass are a few examples of products that were invented and then experienced a 20–50 year gap before they were widely used by consumers as true innovations.

Value creation, value translation, value access

The ideal components for successful innovation include value creation — the initial invention — as well as value translation and value access. “The parts that often get neglected are the value translation component, which is the component about both internally and externally helping people understand how this new thing will fit into their lives. The third point is value access, which is, how you help people get to the value that you’ve created.”

The story of the iPod provides an illustration of the successful employment of all three components. In creating the iPod, Apple not only created new value, but they also created a way to access existing value — a person’s existing music library. Having access to one’s entire music collection in one device created another opportunity for innovation.

“Think about the initial invention of a hard disk-based music player and trying to navigate your entire music collection with two buttons, forward and backward. It’s pretty hard to go through thousands of songs with a forward and a back button. So, Apple created the scroll wheel, and that allowed people to navigate their music collection much more easily.” Then iTunes was created to organize and eventually add to the music library.

In a move to open up value access, “Apple also broke out of the Macintosh mold of keeping things Mac only. The key inflection point for the growth of the iPod was creating a Windows version of iTunes.” Realizing it would be tricky selling a device that wasn’t easily described, Apple knew customers needed a place to experience the iPod. “Apple understood that people working in Target or Best Buy weren’t going to necessarily do as good of a job giving people the experience of using the devices as they thought they could do themselves.” Enter the Apple store and Genius Bar.

“The Apple store serves partially in that value translation component. The Genius Bars serve on the value access side by helping people understand how to get more value out of the device they might be purchasing.”

Start with the end in mind

Measurement provides a good starting point for establishing a strong foundation. “No innovation idea emerges fully formed. What people come up with are idea fragments and you have to collect and connect those dots to create a fully formed idea.” Based on those ideas, begin by identifying the value you want to create.

In order to make sure an initiative creates all the value it intends to, Braden advocates for the use of experiments with checkpoints. “You can have checkpoints that you establish along the way in terms of getting from what you’re able to do now versus your vision for the full value that you hope to create.” When thinking through experiments to validate assumptions about feasibility, viability, and desirability, also consider the flaws that might be present in your experimentation process.

“Start plotting out all the different experiments that you plan to run and the learning that you hope to get from each one. Those are the things that you can measure against to show that you’re making progress, to show that you’re going to get to the end and that you’re on track.”

Planning with the end in mind also includes consideration for scaling the invention. “Make sure you’re laying out checkpoints around your ability to scale it, because if you can’t get to that [wide] adoption point, then most likely you’re not going to get your investment back.” Think through what you’ll have to work against in order to scale so that profitability is part of the long-term plan from the beginning. Braden looks to companies like Tesla as an example of the potentially disastrous effects an inability to profitably scale can have on a product and a company’s viability despite having strong ideas and exploration practices.

A core team of innovation catalysts

Rather than siloing innovation to a single team, Braden has observed that having a core innovation team to facilitate innovation across the company has many benefits. The core team defines frameworks and methodologies for the organization and educates people on the innovation tools at their disposal. The team can work with HR to organize ways of staffing and funding innovation projects. And they can facilitate communication across the organization about ongoing projects both internally and externally. “The approach that I see working the best is where you have a group that’s moving information around, connecting people across the organization with the tools and resources that they need, and helping to tell those stories so that people get excited, engaged, and stay engaged.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to go out and ask people for ideas if you’re not ready to process them and develop them.”

The company’s role, then, is to support the core team with business strategy and goals to align innovation efforts with overall organizational strategy. When establishing this clarity of purpose, Braden encourages having the backend process in place first. “It doesn’t make any sense to go out and ask people for ideas if you’re not ready to process them and develop them and to help people move them from an idea to reality.”

Starbuck’s My Starbucks Idea initiative — a site that solicited ideas from the general public — offers an example of the difficulties in opening the ideation process up too much. Approaches like this produce far more ideas than an organization is able to process and can create a dip in trust and enthusiasm when people don’t see anything come of their suggestions. This can have the unintended consequence of limiting an organization’s ability to solicit ideas later on when they are truly needed and can be acted upon.

To establish the backend process for innovation, Braden starts with defining innovation. “Creating a shared definition for innovation can be a helpful exercise that forms a basis of your overall common language of innovation and some of the other key elements [of] your vision strategy and goals.” This foundation helps people know where to focus, what to focus on, why the organization is pursuing innovation, and how to go about it so it can be leveraged to keep people engaged in creating actionable ideas aligned with the overall business strategy.

“Business strategy goals and metrics are key parts of [the] foundation to build [a] common language of innovation that helps people know how to engage.” In addition to defining what an organization is going to pursue, it can also help to define what won’t be pursued. “I think that it is super helpful because people only have a limited amount of energy and creative energy, so the more you can channel it in the direction that you can actually develop and that are most valuable to you as an organization, the greater return on investment you’re going to get as an organization and also the individuals are gonna get on expending their creative energy.”

This foundation that establishes aligned goals, shared language, and processes for idea intake and processing is what Braden believes to be the innovation silver bullet. “I think if you start well, you finish well, and if you start poorly, you finish poorly. If people really want to be successful in innovation you have to do hard work up front [putting] the right foundation in place so that whatever structure you build on top [will] stand up for a long time rather than come crashing down around your head.”

“I think if you start well, you finish well, and if you start poorly, you finish poorly.”

With a sturdy foundation in place, teams can be empowered to break out of the mindset that people are either innovative or not and open up the process of innovation to allow for greater participation. “Different people tend towards different roles when it comes to innovation, and all the roles are important and needed across the process of innovation.”

In his first book, Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, Braden developed nine innovation roles that he has since developed into a set of cards he uses at workshops.

“It can be very interesting to hear the conversations in the room about not only how individuals tend, but also how organizations tend. [You can learn] which roles tend to be widely available in an organization, which ones tend to be scarce, and how that affects the innovation upwards through the company.”

Braden encourages organizations to use this information to take a more conscious approach to forming innovation teams in order to bring the right roles together and experience greater innovation success.

Balancing exploration and exploitation

As ideas begin to flow, Braden observes that organizations must be conscious of the balance between exploration and exploitation — their present and their future. “Within organizations, there’s this constant tension between exploration and exploitation. You have to have most of the organization focused on scalability, profitability, and making things as efficient as possible, but you also need to have part of the organization looking for those new sources of value that are going to reinvigorate the company and keep it healthy.”

The exploration side of the equation involves staying connected to customers to see how they’re changing over time. “What [customers] trust you to do may also change over time. So, you may be allowed to go to new areas that you weren’t allowed to go to a year ago, five years ago because what they’re trusting you to do may change.”

Finding a balance between exploration and exploitation isn’t easy, and Braden has seen some well-intentioned ideas backfire. Google offering employees 10% of their time to work on an innovation of their choosing is one such case. The reality of this perk is that the 10% of time usually comes out of an employee’s personal time rather than within their 40-hour work week. “Percent time programs often backfire because organizations don’t put a plan in place for how to make that time available.” As organizations establish the foundation for their innovation efforts, incorporating these practical considerations can lead to greater success rates.

The whole person approach to staffing

Braden is encouraged to see the way we think about work shifting for the better. “As companies start to value managing this tension between exploration and exploitation and scaling, [when] they value the sources they’ve already created versus finding new ones, then it enables people to start thinking about how they structure their organization.”

Rather than thinking in terms of job description, more companies are considering the whole person and the capabilities that individuals bring to the organization. “Cisco has this internal internship program where you might be working in finance, but you go do an internship in marketing. So you might spend four days a week working on your regular job and then another day working on a marketing project. So, rather than hiring [from] the outside world, organizations within the organization that have project-based work they need to be done can potentially, as a career development move, leverage people inside the company.” Not only does this approach create opportunities for team building and knowledge transfer, it can also help people looking for a shift find their passion without leaving the company.

Braden looks to companies like Intuit, 3M, and Amazon as leaders in innovation. “Intuit does a really good job of helping to spread innovative thinking and design thinking knowledge across the organization.” They accomplish this through a core team of catalysts that help to establish the innovation foundation and educate people across the company. Braden applauds 3M for creating and supporting a culture of experimentation — the % of innovation time approach at Google was first attempted at 3M. Continuous experimentation is a strength of Amazon’s as well. “They run lots of different experiments all the time. They test out all kinds of different things, and they’re good at killing off the things that don’t work or that they don’t think they’re gonna learn anything more from.”

A spirit of experimentation paired with a firm foundation of business goals and metrics is the key ingredients for expanding innovation across an organization. By taking the time to establish a clear purpose and embracing contributions from a variety of roles, organizations can gain an edge in turning inventions into valuable and scalable innovations capable of displacing competitors and improving the lives of their customers.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Innovation: From Invention to Adoption appeared first on Voltage Control.