By Panashe Maisva

Having an innovation culture in an organisation is every investor’s dream. Amongst the key business outcomes that can be achieved through innovation include the following:

• Maximising ROI;
• Maximising business growth goals;
• Increasing productivity and, as a result, increasing profitability;
• Responding to industry disruptors and increasing market share; and
• Quickly responding to external challenges by developing human as well as technological resources to do things differently.

Lofty business outcomes indeed! But if a survey was to be carried out amongst Boards on the level of awareness of the innovation process amongst Board members, guess what the results will show. This article is an exposé of the innovation process.

Empathise – Define – Ideate – Prototype – Test

Empathise

Innovation is more likely to be triggered in organisations that are deliberate in promoting 360 degrees empathy in their interactions as part of their organisational culture. 360 degrees empathy is all round empathy and, in this context, refers to empathetic interactions in both value chain and supply chain activities.

Empathy, at a basic level, is about living in someone’s shoes, going through somebody’s experience to understand how they feel. Empathy at an organisational cultural level is about organisations having the ability to deeply live and feel the life of their customers, suppliers and the general world around their businesses

When organisations build this cultural competence, they are able to see opportunities well faster than their competitors.

For example, at companies like Nike, people who work on running shoes are actually runners themselves and are able to live the experience of running in Nike running shoes.

Empathy is therefore the core of innovation. When you empathise you are able to fully understand people’s implicit and explicit needs which enables you to come up with design solutions for their needs.

A good example in the beer industry has been the consumer hangover problem. Little success has been achieved in this area.  Any company that is able to design solutions for this age old problem will accrue tremendous revenue success by any measure.

Define the Problem

The next stage in innovation is defining the problem after fully understanding customer needs. This involves a process of reframing, restructuring and defining a problem, anchored on deep user needs and insights rather than a superficial definition of a problem.

The define process is to identify the real problem to solve, based on customer needs and insights accrued from the empathy process.

Using our hangover problem above:

Beer drinkers suffer from dehydration, weakness, headaches, stomach pains and other associated symptoms which are characteristic of hangovers. 

In defining the actual problem, one needs to use insights and needs as obtained during the process of empathy to be able to properly define the hangover problem. Some of the insights around hangover include the fact that some beer drinkers experience lesser hangover insights when they drink water before, during and after beer drinking sessions. Some people feel reduced hangover effects when they shower after a drinking session. Some people manage hangover effects by snacking during their beer drinking sessions, etc.

Ideate

After a problem has been fully defined, large numbers of ideas need to be sparked off in the form of questions and possible solutions. This is Ideation! Ideas that potentially inspire new, better ideas need to flow – cut down into the best, most practical and innovative ones. The old saying, “thinking outside the box” comes into play here. Ideation provides both the fuel and the source material for building prototypes – using creativity and innovation to develop solutions.

Prototyping

When the problem is fully understood, it’s time to create a prototype to try and solve the problem.

A prototype is an attitude of experimentation and trying things out to find a solution to the defined problem. You can prototype a meeting, a service, a product, anything for that matter.

Prototyping is not about waiting until you are ready but starting immediately and running to trial & error & learning in the process. Enlightened trial & error often outperforms precision in advance planning.

Testing

Prototyping is followed by testing the prototype with the user. The purpose of testing is to get additional insights from the user in order to refine your prototype and finally come up with a product that eventually addresses the user problem as defined. So there will be a back and forth between prototyping and testing until the problem is finally addressed.

Boards that successfully drive an innovation agenda in their business develop a high level of awareness of the innovation process.