Innovation Arena - a workshop format to mature innovations: intro

In this blog series I will describe a 2 hours workshop format. A “crowd” of experts, employees and externals will drive the existing ideas that are visible and transparent within an organization to the next level of maturity. If the crowd decides that some ideas made it to the next level of maturity, in maximum two or three ideas are selected by the crowd by a clear crowd selection proceeding. These are the ideas the organization will invest more budget and time to create great innovation.

So the goals of this workshop format we call “Innovation Arena” is:

·         Give idea owners direct feedback to their ideas to improve their ideas

·         Identify the ideas that matured since the last Innovation Arena

·         Select the two or three of the matured ideas that are marked as most valuable

I said: we called “Innovation Arena”. So who is we?

We is a group of people from different places with different backgrounds as there are: Usability, User Experience, Requirements Engineering, Design Thinking, Lean Innovation, Lean & Agile Development, Product Management,  Lean Startup, Management 3.0 and others. We work in different companies with different responsibilities and share ideas – and write about ideas.

Some important references as background reading specific to the “Innovation Arena” are:

From Stars to the Road http://starstoroad.com/blog/?p=175

Companies don’t find it easy to take ideas from the stars and bring them as innovation onto the road. From Stars to the road proposes a generic and agile process to innovation. We think that fruitful collaboration is one of the biggest success factors in innovation. Thus instead of presenting roles, tasks and artefacts, we focus the process on the collaborative structures of a company.

Speed Creation http://www.speedcreation.org/

Speed Creation is a new concept to speed up project incubation time and effort. Goal of speed creation is to create a consistent, confirmed and biased vision about the project. A small and focused expert team work in an intensive 72 hours’ workshop on an idea or innovation, a jury judges and rates the outcome to challenge and improve results.

It is worth to take some time and rummage a bit over these sites.