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.

 

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....