Three things I’ve learned about the innovation process

Hi Reader

Embarking on an innovation project can feel exciting, futuristic, risky and unpredictable. It certainly has its fuzzy moments. But in reality, innovation is a process, and can feel very different.

1. Innovation often doesn’t come from a single blinding insight

• We often think good ideas come from ‘creative people’ and ‘flashes of inspiration’. Creative thinking can help, but good innovation really comes from a lot of research, understanding our customers’ experiences, small insights, and experiments that develop over time.

2. Innovation isn’t only about products

• When we explore customer insights and challenges, we discover key common themes, which shape the experiments we’ll try to address them. These experiments lead us to new understanding, not just about features our customers would like, but also about the tools and processes we use, and about other challenges or hidden opportunities in our systems, each of which can take us in a new direction. A process innovation can also be easier to adopt than developing new products or features.

3. There’s no way to predict the outcome

• We start with a blank canvas… but sometimes we’ll look at the outcome of our project, and even unusual solutions can actually seem obvious, often described as “it was the only thing that made sense”.
  Which also raises the question “why didn’t we just start with this”?
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  Innovation is funny like that - when you look back you can see all the connecting dots that got you to where you are - but looking forward is different: we don’t have a way to foresee the customer insights, the experiments we’ll run, and the data we get from those - or how each new learning will shape our choices and experiments in the next stage. And even if we only made a small change, we’ve made sure we know why we changed it, and what we expect to happen next.

To allow innovation to happen, we need to trust in the power of deliberate exploration and small insights. The process can even feel a little routine at times, working carefully through the data. But taking the time we need to explore options and experiment with solutions can lead to incredible breakthroughs in our products and processes.

Cara Turner Innovation & Agile Coach M: +27 84 500 4425 ​E: coach@caraturner.com | www.caraturner.com​

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