Sunday, January 13, 2013

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.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

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
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.
 

Friday, January 4, 2013

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)
Idea presentation on a Pinboard
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.