Innovation Arena: Get-together, pre-selection

I, my last blog entry was in January this year. I am sorry and apologize in case you have been waiting. I had some exciting projects and learned a lot. Now I start again to give back to the community.
So I continue with Innovation Arena and the agenda of an Innovation arena run.

The get-together

The room is prepared and the experts dropped in. Now it is you term to introduce into the ceremony of Innovation Arena. If Innovation Arena is well known to most of the experts, you might decide to shorten this step. In case of new externals as invited experts, I recommend do introduce in full length. External experts need to understand what is expected and to feel welcome and comfortable.

As moderator explain the overall objectives and every single workshop steps. It is important to highlight the collaborative nature of the workshop. All participants act on eye level. All participants have the chance and are expected to give feedback. Transport the idea that Innovation Arena is a positive meeting, so participants shall focus on adding and improving ideas instead of critics and risks.

It is very important to explain:

• the way pre-selection of ideas is done (if used)
• how to use the prioritization criteria
• how the rating is executed
• how the results will be determined
• what the next steps are, when this Innovation Arena run is closed

Now all experts are prepared and hopefully in the mind set to drive the ideas of your organization with motivation and creativity.

The pre-selection of ideas 

In Innovation Arena, the crowd of experts shall concentrate on a restricted set of ideas. We recommend taking 5 to 15 ideas into one run.

For sure this is an option to play with. Some organizations use two full days on a similar type of workshop and take a hundred ideas of potential features of future development into one run. If you act more local and internal, a higher frequency, but shorter timeframe (as proposed in this blog) typically is preferable because of faster feedback cycles and reflection. If you are more globally and distributed, with many externals like key customers representatives, a lower frequency with longer time boxes might better suit the constraints of distribution. Play with these options and you will find the best fit for your organization.

Even this pre-selection step is optional. I recommend a pre-selection only in case you run Innovation Arena in higher frequency in your organization, with a more local setup, and based on an already established shared understanding of the ideas. With this setup pre-selection is easy. The majority of experts already know the ideas presented on the pinboards.

Image 1: How to arrange ideas pinboards in an Innovation Arena run

If the pinboards are placed as in the image, a collaborative and self-organizing way of pre-selection is to please the participants to place themselves in front of this one pinboard with the most promising ideas in this workshop run from their very personal view. Explain that we will work in this Innovation Arena run with about five ideas pre-selected by the most experts in front of the representing pinboard. This way of pre-selection fosters collaboration, movement and a positive start.

If you run Innovation Arena regularly in your organization, the experts understand the criteria “the most promising ideas in this workshop run from your personal view”. If the experts do not understand, this is a signal that you have to work on this shared understanding. This shared understanding under the experts in your organization reflects the alignment with strategic objectives. But that is a different story and maybe some time a blog on its own.

This pre-selection works better with more experts in the room than pinboards. Ideal you have at least twice the number of experts than pinboards. And you should have at least twice the number of experts than pinboards. Otherwise the group of experts is restricted to the idea owners and this is for sure a sub-optimal setup.

Be flexible in applying this pre-selection step. But I am sure you got the idea and see options how to play with this.

Next Blog will be about pitching ideas and probably the most important step: the rating...

Innovation Arena – The workshop overall agenda

Prepare the room

Prepare a room where the number of invited experts will move freely without standing on their toes. Requirements for a room are

• place about ten pinboards at all in form of a vernisage
• place five pinboard side by side with room between
• enough place for all the attendees to move freely between pinboards and discuss
• one or two tables in the background to place moderation material, marker, sticky notes, ...

In good time before starting the workshop invite about ten owners of ideas on the same maturity level (either star, cloud, tree or road) that are interested and selected to nurture their ideas in this Innovation Arena run. They have to transport and place their idea pinboard to visualize their idea within the room before the first attendee will arrive. Ideal all of them used the Business Model Generation in visualizing their idea anywhere on the pinboard.

Place sticky notes in different colors (useful are yellow, green and light red ones) on the tables in the background together with markers and sticky points at least in three colors (red, green, blue) needed for the rating process.

Now your room is prepared and the Innovation Arena is ready to start.

Agenda

Time	Activity
3:00 pm	As moderator: prepare the room, place the pinboards with the ideas
4:00 pm	The Get-Together The experts are entering the room. When all experts arrived, the pitch light for all ideas runs Pre-selection picks out the five ideas for the following nurturing and selection process.
4:30 pm	The Idea Pitch The idea owner of the five pre-selected ideas pitches their ideas. Each idea is pitched time boxed within three minutes plus seven minutes feedback by the experts.
5:30 pm	Rating of ideas All experts rate the ideas using the everybody well know criteria.
6:00 pm	Short break to discuss and add additional feedback to the ideas
6:15 pm	Presentation of results The ranking of the five ideas is presented to the audience. The Feedback is given back to the idea owners.
6:30 pm	Retrospective
6:45 pm	After Session Social Event Serve something the audience like pizza, cola, ...

You can download an agenda template (as .docx or zipped .docx) to prepare your company specific agenda.

The following blogs will discuss the steps in the agenda.

Innovation Arena – prerequisites: invite experts

All in all we are well prepared for an Innovation Arena run – expect that we still need to invite participants. so this blog discusses whom to invite.

In the perfect case this is not a big issue. Within an organization that supports and fosters innovation and cares for a nurturing culture, an Innvoation Arena runs takes place following a well-known rhythm. A community exists that knows, understands and is motivated to participate in the regularly runs to push innovation forward.

But to be fair: Not many organizations are on that visionary level. There are many company cultures that value margins or benefits ways more important than innovation. I personally would extend the agile manifesto by: Fostering Innovation over margins and benefits. To foster and realize innovations are the benefits and margins of tomorrow. But this is another story.

So you might want to start an Innovation Arena run in your company and ask yourself whom to invite. Our advice is

• Select carefully the ideas that will be presented to the participants during an Innovation Arena run. The number of ideas to be selected shall be between 7 to 15 ideas. The ideas shall be tagged with the same maturity level or within two subsequent maturity levels. Invite for sure all the idea owners of the presented ideas.
• Select members of the management. i.e. potential sponsors of innovation, product managers, the head of product management, the CIO and CTO or head of R&D. Invite from time to time managers that are not directly related with product development such as the head of marketing or operations. As long as you do not exhaust the members of the management (there time is rare), this is a chance to win a potential sponsor or future product manager.
• Invite selected employees from other departments in your organization as well. The don’t have to be subject matter experts. If these experts are interested and motivated they will bring in challenging comments and input and will grade innovations with a fresh mind and unbiased.
• Very important as well is to invite partners, key customers and externals. Positive but critical individuals from outside your organization are even more unbiased and will challenge your ideas. And…these individuals are you potential customers of the innovations under discussion. Prerequisite for sure is that these individuals are persons of special trust. For sure you and your colleagues are able to identify individuals that qualify.

The last point for sure needs to be evaluated. Some ideas are sensible intellectual property. In this case the expert crowd needs to be hand-picked to individuals that comply with security policies. 



Innovation Arena: The Crowd of Experts

Carefully prepare the invitation send to the expert – as for any workshop that you prepare. The invitation shall include the following information

• Date, time, length and location of the Innovation Arena.
• An agenda of the workshop.
• The motivation for the invited individual to attend. What are the benefits for this person? Take the chance and address the personal needs and interests of the experts.
• The benefit for you as inviting individual and for the organization in large.
• The expected output of the workshop.
• Reassure that absolute no preparation is needed to attend. Just drop in.

We urgently recommend avoiding any reading or preparation in advance. Individuals explicit shall attend with no need for preparation. They shall drop in with a fresh mind and full of curiosity. The Innovation Arena will start in a way all participants are attracted and involved. 
 So, all prerequisites are prepared and we are ready to go. Next blog will introduce the red line through an Innovation Arena run and go through the schedule before we discuss important steps and actions in more detail.

 

Literature - Infinite Jest

I am on page 1076 of the book infinite jest (get infinite jest on amazon) by David Foster Wallace. It needs some time to be a friend with this book. I needed 3 months and about 500 pages to get a picture. In the beginning I had moments when I thought about storing infinite jest away - far away - unreachable, but I never did.

Now it is the most important book on my bedside locker...and beside the infinite jest (now 5 months) I get out of it, I already read about seven other books in parallel (so for example Great Expectations by Charles Dickens or - sorry not a novel, but a very good specialist book -  Agile Requirements Engineering by Dean Leffingwell)

Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 year.
For readers in German: 15 years went by until Ulrich Blumenbach started with a translation. The translation work required six years, two fellowships and granted with the Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse. See as well the internet page about the German Version "Unendlicher Spass"

Innovation Arena – prerequisites: Transparency of ideas

We discussed a lot about the course of ideas in the last two or so years with many people from different areas, domains and background. We all agree more or less that creating ideas is far easier than making ideas visible and transparent – especially to perception by the management of organization where ideas can be feed with resources to turn ideas into innovations.

Visibility and transparency of ideas is important to discuss, compare, enhance, nurture and to communicate agree and confirm ideas.

The question is: what is a suitable solution to present an idea?

We recommend a combination of:

• A physical pinboard (This is the most important thing)
• A public innovation space in your company (the bridge between the south and the north floor in your headquarter, a part of your companies public café space)
• using graphical elements (put the maturity icon on top left ;-)
• using structured elements like the Osterwalder Business Canvas (see http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/). We really recommend the Osterwalder Business canvas as a very focused way to present an idea or innovation. For freaks: there is even an iPad App to generate an electronic version.
• providing space on the pinboard (with cards and markers to add feedback when passing by)

Present ideas on a physical pinboard

 

Of course every single ideas will be as well (hopefully) registered and presented electronically at some intranet location. This internet location should be easily found by all of your employees as well with the chance to give feedback. The idea owner is responsible for the information on this page. He is the driver of his idea.

 

But the most important thing is the physical pinboard. The idea owner creates the pinboard. His craftsmanship will present the idea ideally in a format so that it is easily understood. Motivation his peers to discuss in front of the pinboard he will get feedback to enhance the idea. He will place the pinboard at the public innovation space in his company to nurture the ideas to the next maturity level.

We will use these pinboards in our Innovation Arena runs.

Innovation Arena – prerequisites: The maturity of an idea

Prerequisites and preparations so we can start with an innovation arena run are as following:

1. We recommend that an idea exists about the maturity level of an idea or Innovation (see http://starstoroad.com/blog/?p=175).
2. The existing ideas and potential innovations within our organization must be visible and transparent.
3. We need to fill the arena with a crowd of experts

Let’s have a closer look into these prerequisites.

Maturity of an idea or potential innovation

You could ask: Why does the maturity matter?

Well, easy to answer: your company has a limited amount of money to invest into innovation. So your company power is limited to invest only in a small set of ideas. Statistics show that only one out of ten ideas really reach the state of a product to be sold on the market on once again only one out of ten products sold on the market gains sound profit.

Following the statistics, your company will be more successful on the market if it invests only in five to ten ideas out of a hundred. Additionally most of innovation budget shall go into the products that are just before market launch. That is the most critical time where speed is essential to win against competitors. That implies only a small budget shall go into the selection process that identifies the ninety to ninety-five ideas that are still on hold. And these ideas are on hold of different reasons: Vision is not clear, the market is not clear, the market is not awaiting the product, the company is unable the develop the product, whatever internal or external reason there are.

A simple understood maturity model for ideas is a good way to go. I recommend the “from stars to the road” maturity model by Markus Flückiger and Pete Jones. References are the blog entry by Markus and Pete about stars to the road, their presentation about the maturity levels (and the icons ready for download used for the different maturity levels).

The maturity model is simple. It works with the maturity levels star, cloud, tree and road

Star		The idea is a first sparkling glitter. There is no chance to say if the idea could be developed into something concrete or we do not have any feedback if anybody has interest in that idea
Cloud		We see contures and shapes. We are able to at least communcate a vision for that ideas; the most important features of that ideas and who the personas, the target market is that might have interest in that idea.
Tree		The idea is pretty concrete. We have a vision, we clearly see a potential target market, but there are still some issues and risks before we really are willing to invest a sound budget to develop that idea and turn it into an innovation. We could say we see already the apples hanging in the tree, but still they do not fall off.
Road		No we got it on the road down under our feed. We are willing to invest and we will invest to develop that terrific new thing am make the innovation happen.

There is one important thing in your company I would like to remind of: Please do not establish a detailed and formalistic innovation maturity model with a huge set of criteria in your company. That will not work. That will kill creativity and visionary thinking. These maturity levels have to be defined in discussions, via communication and agreement by the involved persons.

I hope as well there are many of persons involved – more then just the managers of the company, but as well employees, clients, partner, friends or even people out of a cloud. Yes: one side result of the Innovation Arena is as well to agree about these maturity levels.

The second side result is: It shall be transparent and understood to every single one in your company what amount of resources (money, time, …) your company invests into an idea on a specific maturity level. And yes: you should set a limit for the number of ideas that hit the road as the next innovations of your company. Turning these ideas into innovations eats up resources.

...next blog will discuss transparency of an idea....

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.