What are the best strategies for creating a strategic innovation lab?

Define clear goals, foster a creative culture, assemble a diverse team, establish a structured innovation process, invest in a conducive environment, encourage cross-functional collaboration, embrace agile methodologies, provide ongoing learning, measure success metrics, and maintain open communication with leadership for strategic alignment.

The purpose is a problem you want to solve. Basic scientific method. The best startups identify the best problems. As an owner you need to work relentlessly to find a profitable solution and by profit I just mean worry about keeping yourself in business first. Solution R&D should be based around environmentally ethical standards. The truth is the truth comes out so being unethical will get you bankrupt faster than anything. The best startups are when the owner is both doing the books and participates in the operation. Challenge yourself

Any lab environment needs to have a strict timeline. Effectiveness decreases the longer it takes and as usual group dynamics start to form and non-adgenda events start to creep in. The minute you hear,”so what’s everyone doing on the weekend?”, grab your crayons and head out not to return, it’s become a ‘group’ not a ‘lab’.

This step implies one person coming up with the idea for a strategic innovation lab. So my first step would be to start to talking to people in your organization that are already doing innovation. They will have insights that are very valuable in making the innovation lab a success. Second insight is that an innovation lab in a standing organization will always struggle. Dynamics of innovation don’t mingle well with routines and stability of the organization. Innovation challenges the status quo and stability that people have come to rely on. So know what you are getting yourself into. Having said that, it can be well worth it!

In defining your purpose, you need to do three things: 1. Clarify Organizational Goals: Immerse yourself in understanding the overarching organizational objectives. Identify areas where innovation serves as a critical catalyst for business growth and long-term sustainability. 2. Customer-Centric Exploration: Proposal of a customer-centred approach to innovation, where the lab's purpose is aligned with addressing customer needs and market gaps through transformative solutions. 3. Data-Driven Ideation: Gather and analyze market and internal data to pinpoint areas of opportunity and potential challenges that the lab should address.

To design an effective and resilient process, you need to infuse agile principles that empower rapid ideation, experimentation, and adaptation, ensuring a nimble approach to innovation. Then you begin to cultivate a culture of continual experimentation and rapid prototyping, enabling the exploration of diverse alternatives and fostering a mindset that accepts calculated risk-taking. These will help to foster collaborative environments that bring together diverse skill sets and perspectives, breaking down silos and promoting a cohesive, impactful work environment.

You need to be well versed and experienced in psychology and empathy to truly understand this objective. Your people have needs. Take care of them. You will be judged as well and need to empathize with judgement endearingly and not mitigate the scrutiny with ego

Designing your process is the creative moment during the process. You must be deliberate with design when it comes to innovation. Exploring myriads of concepts, percussing ideas, aggregating and reaggregating some of the concepts to create new different ideas from the original tangent, and then performing more percussing is crucial. More to this, there must be sifting and funneling that must drive the ideas to testing and prototyping. Not forgetting that there must be test runs of these ideas through experimentations, applications, surveys, and opinion pooling. By this, you can return to the drawing board to make necessary revisions and adjustments before the implementation stage. This ensures the refinement of the process.

Before innovation can flourish, a space and process that encourages permission needs to be your foundation. Build and design your process with YES in mind at all levels. Generative processes need to be built with a permission engine!

Necessity is the mother of invention and variety is the spice that drives necessity. Involving different professionals from varied backgrounds, unique experiences, skill sets, and multidisciplinary approaches towards the ideation processes will brace the process. The fostering of collaboration among teams will undergird the foundations of the project for the team to run with the vision. However, the cultural nuances, preferences, and perspectives of team members should be well considered by the team lead to ensure cohesion. More critically, you need versatility in the skills set in a way that will ensure the identified gaps during the ideation process get filled through synergy. With a solid team, your vision is set on a sound footing.

Leaders lead and are involved in every aspect of their business. The owner needs to set the example not crack the whip from behind. This attracts the best talent you could ever hope for. People follow courage so wear it on your sleeve.

Assemble a multidisciplinary team with diverse skill sets, ensuring innovation occurs through a blend of perspectives from different domains and backgrounds. Create an environment where team members feel empowered to take ownership of their work, fostering a sense of accountability and dedication to the lab's objectives. Establish a culture of continuous learning and knowledge sharing, encouraging personal and professional growth for all team members.

La diversidad en el equipo me parece un punto clave y no menor a la hora de innovar, ya que contar con perspectivas que tengan diferentes miradas abre la mente a nuevas ideas, fomentando la serendipia. La inclusión de personas con diversos antecedentes, experiencias y habilidades no solo enriquece el ambiente de trabajo, sino que también desencadena un intercambio de ideas más amplio y creativo. Esta diversidad permite abordar los desafíos desde múltiples ángulos, lo que puede conducir a soluciones innovadoras e inesperadas que un equipo homogéneo quizás no hubiera considerado. Así, se promueve un entorno propicio para la colaboración, el aprendizaje continuo y la generación de ideas disruptivas

This goes back to the problem you want to solve. Part of the solution is the budget. Waste not but anticipate shrink. Whether it’s a business loan or your own capital the numbers have to make sense

In my experience, also incorporating digital tools and platforms in a physical workspace, to encourage innovation, facilitate communication exchange of ideas, and flexibility is highly important especially where team members are drawn from different geographical location. The space should enable creativity. My previous employer had some pod-like space for napping, just to allow people explore without some constraints

At this point, you will now set up your space either virtual or physical. This stage must be guided by the vision and the strategy and not necessarily fanciful things. Your space must be fitted with purpose and backed by your budget in a way that will embody the essence of the innovation you seek to achieve with the lab. Factors like User experience (UX), User interface (UI), and other frameworks must all fit the thinking and guide into the choice of tools and gadgets to be deployed. In the final analysis, your innovation lab must be both USEFUL AND USABLE.

Simply put engagement is more about listening than presenting an idea. All you need to say or ask is what is your perspective in solving this problem. Gather feedback and evidence. Balance accordingly

WENNOVATE instead of INNOVATE The main reason why innovation projects get stopped is according to a linkedin poll: ‘LACK OF MANAGEMENT BUY-IN. That’s why in my experience as facilitator of 100+ projects you should better WENNOVATE instead of INNOVATE. Let me explain… Innovation is a long journey with high uncertainty. That’s why you should get all your internal - and external partners and the decision makers aligned as from the start, agreeing all on both your assignment and process. When you WENNOVATE in the way your project will be based on: - commitment, - trust, and - openness. Check out the FORTH innovation methodology, which combines design thinking with business thinking, which is based on this WENNOVATE principle.

From experience, this is the point where you connect with the community. Connection is everything but one must be very strategic during the connection in a way that will ensure that the vision will survive and thrive through continuity, growth, scalability, and sustainability. Currencies like collaboration, involvement, co-creation, and partnerships lend themselves to engaging with all stakeholders.

Based on my experience, I select this step as the most important one without any hesitation. The goal of a strategic innovation lab is to solve more relevant problems with innovative solutions. It's a gradual process. The only way to success in such endeavors is to keep learning and applying them in the future iterations. Specially, keeping close attention to community feedback is very critical.

Reflexionar sobre los éxitos y fracasos brinda valiosas lecciones: los fracasos no son obstáculos, son oportunidades de aprendizaje. Identificar qué funcionó y por qué, así como qué no funcionó y cuáles fueron las razones, permite un crecimiento constante. Es crucial aplicar estos aprendizajes para mejorar las soluciones, procesos y equipos. Las herramientas como el Impact Canvas o el Learning Loop son excelentes para capturar este conocimiento y convertirlo en acciones concretas. Además, fomentan una cultura de mejora continua dentro del laboratorio, donde cada experiencia se convierte en un pilar para construir soluciones más sólidas y efectivas en el futuro

Si algo caracteriza un buen laboratorio es su capacidad de iterar, e implementar los resultados obtenidos en nuevos desarrollos y estrategias más afinadas, orientadas a los usuarios finales. En este sentido, hay que tener la suficiente madurez profesional para evitar "apropiarse" de los insight, ya que cuanto más nos identificamos con ellos, más difícil no resultará flexibilizar criterios de cara a un proceso de innovación estratégica

Innovation theaters waste resources on PR stunts. For real impact, labs must address strategic growth needs, not just look cool. Staff with unconventional thinkers from the edge of your industry and unrelated domains. Avoid insular corporate yes-men. Give the lab input into planning processes but maintain some independence. Embed their provocative voice without smothering it through rigid rules. Set explicit benchmarks for commercialization rates - labs should yield patented IP and new revenue engines, not just demonstrations. Fund patiently but evaluate aggressively. Support their long term vision but kill stagnant projects immediately that show little promise.

When creating a strategic innovation lab, include going back to square one. Reassess the original value proposition that is offered and address whether it stands out as a current value. When providing a service or product, it is important to understand if the service is meeting the client's present needs. Ask our teams, if we can expand the niche, go global, add or change the offer, customize, update services or product? Has the competition, societal events, or technologies advanced to deem a significance for innovative development? Focus on the past and present constructs to create improvements for a viable future.

I think the simple answer is to just give people space to create and have fun. Remove the pressure... Make it a safe place to return to our 6 year old self.

Take unplanned breaks and find inspiration in other places and spaces. Don't force the creative process into a strict methodical corset.