10 Methods to Help You Innovate Online

COVID19 Sparked the online economy worldwide, We now live - and work in a new hybrid reality. Customers expect in this changing world new solutions. Agile organisations not only work online but also started to innovate their offerings 100% online. You don't want to loose speed and effectiveness not being able to innovate your usual way, do you?

That's why we brought proven innovation methods, like Design Sprint, Lean Startup or FORTH, 100% online using new digital tools and platforms. So you can speed up generating revolutionary business cases with your team to effectively fill your innovation funnel.

Bringing these design thinking and innovation methods online the last years we learned so much that we liked to share our online innovation insights in a new book called 'ONLINE INNOVATION', available now on Amazon.co.uk

We like to help you to be a great online design thinker and - innovator. That's why we like to share with you below 10 innovation methods to kick-start innovation online the right way:

·?????Three innovation methods for short online workshops: Problem Framing, the Customer Experience Deck (CXD), and the Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ).

·?????Two methods for online innovation sprints of a week or less: Pretotyping and the Design Sprint.

·?????Five methods for online innovation projects in which we feature the FORTH innovation method, Lean Startup, the Business Model Canvas, the Purpose Launchpad, and the Circular design process.

All these methods have incorporated the principles of design thinking. Design thinking is a multidisciplinary human-centred approach with (at least) three phases:

1.????Discovery by listening and observing.

2.????Idea Generation, leading to out-of-the-box ideas.

3.????Pretotype and Testing of new solutions with users.

CXD, Problem Framing, and LDJ are more focused on the discovery phase, Pretotype more on the pretotype and test phase, while all the other methods embrace all the three phases. Some of them are for startups or specific phases of a company, such as Purpose Launchpad and Lean Sprint. But they can very well be used by organisations that want to innovate products or services. Others, such as the CXD, give insights into the way people within teams perceive their customers. Some, like the FORTH innovation methodology, effectively boost an effective start of innovation. The Purpose Launchpad and the Circular Process are meta-methodologies, combining various other methods to thrive social impact.

1. Problem Framing

Problem framing helps to define the right problem at the beginning of an innovation process. Many of you experienced the situation in your own company or as a consultant that the problem you’re trying to solve seems to not be the right one, which you discovered only after spending time and money. In business, we ha've many examples of products or services not addressing the right problem. This usually happens because we are doers; instead of living the discomfort of addressing the problem, we'd start working toward a solution. Additionally, solutions are usually copies of our past successful experiences. However, it is not wise to assume that what worked in a certain situation in the past will work again in the future. Thinking about our switch from in-person to online collaboration, for example, the right question wasn't how to replicate methodologies using video conferencing but how to brainstorm at a distance while engaging people online.

For more on Problem Framing click here.

2. Customer Experience Deck

The Customer Experience Deck (CXD) was created in 2019 by Jeremy Dean to help teams build a shared understanding of their customers. It's a simple nine-step process to build your customers' shared vision and start innovating the customer experience. You can apply it to create a shared understanding of the client's needs and get insights on the critical elements of the desired customer experience and how you can work together to shape it. You can then integrate it in other more structured methodologies: in the FORTH innovation method in the Observe and Learn phase, before the customer friction interviews, or in the Business Model Canvas in the Customer relationship section. Another way of using the CXD is to innovate internal practices and working starting from the customer experience. So, it's the first step in the discovery phase. Afterwards, use other online innovation methods to continue.

The CXD is a nine micro-step process that leads a group to identify a customer segment they want to work with and understand the customers' desired and undesired feelings. In the first seven steps, participants individually address the question:

?How do we want our customers to feel and how do we want them not to feel?

?This question triggers a process of description, discovery, and sharing of the team's customer experience, aiming to align the vision. Through the detailed description of the emotions you want to elicit with your product or service, you create a common language and gain valuable insights. ??The Customer Experience Deck workshop must be attended both by people involved in the customer experience and others whose work is not related to it. It is also essential that decision-makers join in to follow up on the actions defined.

Form more on the CXD click here .

3. Lightning Decision Jam

One of the main obstacles for innovation in organisations is that there’s a lot of unstructured discussion on it with unclear outcomes. Instead, follow a structured method that leads to more ideas, decisions and clear action steps with internal support. A process that helps you to start DOING things. The Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) is an excellent method to get your team in action mode. It is a fast exercise; it eliminates discussion; it allows all team members to contribute, leading to tangible action steps to get started NOW.

?The Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) is a 60 to 90-minute exercise generating solutions to a problem you face with a product or service, for trying to come up with new product features, to solve a problem within a team or process – any problem you can imagine. It helps to identify problems and challenges participants in the workshop have in mind. It gives the organisation insights into what employees see happening. And it triggers them to come up with ideas to solve those problems, and above that, generate action steps to start testing solutions directly. No writing memos, no reports and no plans, but clear, measurable activities that will give insights into what works and what doesn't. So, it is about taking action fast. That is why the process is called Lightning Decision Jam: it is fast (like lightning), and it is aimed at gathering input from all participants to make decisions.

?The process can also help familiarise those new to innovation to the characteristic way of working and thinking needed to be successful: having no discussions and everyone can contribute. So, it is not about those with the loudest voice getting the most attention, but group work where all personalities can give their input and share their ideas. Since the Lightning Decision Jam is a process of only 60 to 90 minutes, it is very easy to try without risk. As soon as participants experience working in a very structured way with short timeboxed activities, most of them – if not all – will see the power of it. This opens the door to more extensive online innovation methods like the Design Sprint and the FORTH innovation method.

For more on LDJ click here .

4. Pretotyping

Pretotyping is a method to quickly and economically validate whether your idea is worth pursuing in your innovation process.??The word Pretotype is a neologism created by Alberto Savoia. It is a fake product or service you want to realise that simulates and precedes the real one. The main reason to use it is 'o make sure you are building the right It before you build It right.' It aims to see if the market is interested in a product or service before investing too much time and resources in developing an innovative idea.

Pretotyping is also a way to test if you are suitable for the product: that you possess the energy, commitment, and motivation in the case it happens to be a success. The starting point of a pretotype process is that you have an idea and write it as a simple concept with a target customer and an ideal price. Before investing much money in a real prototype and a launching campaign, you collect feedback from your potential market by doing market experiments.

In his lecture at Stanford, Alberto Savoia describes the seven main elements:

1. Obey the law of market failure, as data show that most of the new ideas will fail in the market even if competently executed.
2. Make sure you are building the right It before you built It right. The right It is a product that, if competently executed, will have success.
3. Don't get lost in 'thoughtland', the land of opinion, because opinions are biased and have no value without data.
4. Trust only on Your Data (YODA). Data collected yourself satisfy the criteria of 'freshness, relevance, trustworthiness, and significance'.
5. Pretotype it. Build a simple artefact or technique to collect YODA very quickly and inexpensively.
6. Say it with numbers. Concretely express your hypothesis; for example, X% of Y (market) will do this.
7. Think global, test local. Start as soon as possible to test and to get your first data.

For more on Pretotyping click here .

5. Design Sprint

In his book, 'How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days', the creator of the Design Sprint, Jake Knapp, described the Design Sprint Process as 'The greatest hits of business strategy, innovation, behavioural science, and more. All packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can follow'.

A Design Sprint is a time-boxed, five-stage process that has design thinking as its foundation. It aims to reduce the risk of bringing a new product, service, or feature to the market. The process helps teams to define clear goals, validate assumptions, and agree on a road map that the product will take before starting development. The process aims to address strategic issues using interdisciplinary, rapid prototyping, and useability testing.

?The high-level five-day process is defined below.

• Understand: Discover the business opportunity, the audience, the competition, and the value proposition, and define success metrics.
• Diverge: Explore, develop and iterate creative ways of solving the problem, regardless of feasibility.
• Converge: Identify ideas that fit the next product cycle and explore them in further detail through storyboarding.
• Prototype: Design and prepare prototypes that are tested with people.
• Test: Conduct 1:1 usability testing with five to six people from the product's primary target audience. Ask good questions.

Former Google Ventures design partner Jake Knapp devised the planning sprint process for Google in 2010. He drew inspiration from such areas as Google's development culture and IDEO's design thinking workshops. In design sprints, teams work on problems and goals differently than when siloed within the product development departments in the traditional waterfall process. A carefully selected team from across the organisation focuses on themselves. They manage their time to systematically collaborate and define a user problem to test a possible solution within five days. Sprints are also integral to agile development. Self-organised, cross-functional teams work to supply short-term deliverables and improve quality while keeping a careful watch on current user needs and any changing circumstances.

For more on Design Sprint click here .

6. Lean Startup

Lean Startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products. The Lean Startup method was originated in 2008 by Eric Ries using his personal experiences adapting lean management and customer development principles to high-tech startups. The method combines experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. The Lean Startup method seeks to increase value-producing practices during the earliest phases of a company to have a better chance of success. It emphasises customer feedback over intuition and flexibility over planning. The five principles of Lean Startups are:

?1.?????Entrepreneurs are everywhere.

2.?????Entrepreneurship is management.

3.?????Validated learning.

4.?????Innovation accounting.

5.?????Build-measure-learn.

?Lean Startup aims to shorten product development cycles and avoid developing a product nobody wants. 'The Lean Startup method is not about cost; it's about speed.' But how long it takes to go from an idea to a successful business will vary greatly among sectors. Unlike typical yearlong product development cycles, Lean Startup eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product iteratively and incrementally. The iterative feedback loop is a three-step process.

Developing a minimum viable product (MVP), the 'version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort", plays a crucial role in Lean Startup. The goodness of the MPV is not measured by its efficiency but by its ability to generate learning. ??The measure of a startup's progress is, in fact, learning. The speed of execution serves to transform leap-of-faith assumptions into metrics to be validated rapidly. The validation of the assumptions takes place through innovation accounting. This method requires acquiring accurate data through feedback from cohorts (homogeneous clusters) on the MVP, identifying the relationship between improvements made to the product and the drivers of the growth model. Based on the data, it is decided whether to persevere with continuous improvements or to make a major change to test a new hypothesis.

For more on Lean Startup click here .

7. BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS

The business model generation process is a well-known methodology developed in the 2000s by Alexander Osterwalder. His best-known tool is the Business Model Canvas (BMC), used to map business models and understand where the competitive advantages, risks, and opportunities lie. It’s applied to make better-shared decisions on an everyday basis, monitor the evolution of different areas of the model, and make incremental changes in your offerings.

The well-known nine blocks of a BMC are:

1. Customer Segments. You can have one or several. For whom are we creating value?
2. The Value Proposition. The way an organisation solves customer problems and satisfies customer needs. What value do we deliver to our customers?
3. Channels. The way an organisation delivers its value proposition through communications, distribution, and sales channels. Through which channels can we reach our customer segments?
4. Customer relationship. The way the organisation communicates with the customers. What type of relationship does each of our customer segments expect us to establish and maintain with them?
5. Revenue streams. The revenue streams generated by the value proposition. For what value are our customers willing to pay?
6. Key resources. The resources are necessary to create and deliver the value proposition. What key resources do our value propositions require?
7. Key Activities. What key activities do our value propositions require?
8. Key partnerships. Who are our key partners? Who are our key suppliers?
9. The Cost Structure. The fixed and variable costs. What are the most important costs inherent to our business?

The BMC is also a methodology to innovate a company's offer or business model because it allows us to identify specific areas from which to innovate. There are four areas of the canvas from which innovation can spark:

1. Resource- driven, when an organisation expands its business model using existing infrastructure or partnerships. For example, during the first phase of the pandemic, Innova , an Italian startup from Brescia, had the idea of installing 3D-printed respiratory valves on Decathlon diving masks, thus making up for the lack of respiratory machines. Decathlon supported the company by providing the CAD model and supporting engineers to integrate the project in the best possible way.
2. Offer-driven, when innovation starts from your offer. For example, schools in many countries have changed their teaching processes through online teaching because of Covid19.
3. Customer-driven, based on customer needs, such as the apps created to manage queues at supermarkets where there were restricted entrances due to the pandemic's safety measure.
4. Finance-driven, innovations driven by new revenue streams pricing mechanisms or reduced cost structure. On a newspaper website, the customer does not have to have a subscription anymore but can pay for each article he wants to read at a minimal fee, invoiced immediately.

For more on the BMC click here .

8. FORTH innovation method

FORTH is an innovation method that helps organisations to become innovative by generating new business cases and empowering team members with an innovative mindset in a 12-week online-structured-process. The process is scientifically proven and successful as it combines design thinking and business thinking. The method was created in 2005 by the global keynote speaker and innovation authority, Gijs van Wulfen. In 2013, he published ‘The Innovation Expedition' (also BIS Publishers), which became a worldwide innovation bestseller that has been translated into nine languages.

FORTH is an acronym. It stands for the five phases of this method. Full Steam Ahead is about preparing yourself for a real innovation expedition. That means understanding why the innovation journey should start now, what you should you be looking for, and how innovation success is defined. Furthermore, you achieve full buy-in from all stakeholders from the beginning, plan the journey, engage a team, and kick off the expedition. In Observe and Learn, you get ‘the blinders off’ of all participants and reach out to customers to understand their needs and customer frictions. In Raise Ideas, you generate a lot, upwards of a thousand, ideas online and convert the 15 best ones into concepts. With real customer feedback, you improve the concepts in Test Ideas. In the final phase, Homecoming, you transform the five best concepts into mini new business cases. You end the journey with a decision that will be transferred into the organisations’ innovation funnel of the three to five mini new business cases.

The next online training as certified FORTH innovation facilitator starts April 5, 2022.

For more on FORTH click here .

9. Purpose Launchpad

Purpose Launchpad is an open methodology and a mindset to generate and evolve early-stage initiatives into purpose-driven organisations to make a significant difference. It was developed by Francisco Palao, with the input of ?more than 150 contributors around the world. It was designed to help people build purpose-driven organisations and evolve their mindsets to become explorers who will discover the right path to create a new organisation, business, product, or service that will make a positive impact in the world. It works for startups or teams with an early-stage idea. It is also applicable to established organisations that want to transform themselves into purpose-driven organisations. It is a meta-methodology, meaning that it includes many innovation frameworks and methods like design thinking, design sprints, agile, and scrum. It’s like having a toolkit with all the tools inside, and you only take certain tools when applicable, depending on the situation within the organisation.

The Purpose Launchpad is a holistic approach meaning that you work on eight interconnected key areas: Purpose, People, Customer, Abundance, Viability, Processes, Product, and Metrics. There is no clear linear order of development. It is, however, true that one should not move on to the next stage without having evolved all of the key eight areas. They don't necessarily evolve in the order of appearance in the spiral diagram. The assessment might show that, for example, Viability is further developed than People and Customer. In such a case, focussing on the People and Customer axes in the next sprints is advisable to help evolve all axes evenly outward on the radar. The reason to do this is to ensure that it is not a 'false sense of viability'. An organisation might be successfully selling products, giving them the belief that they've obtained a successful value proposition and business model. Still, until this is validated against the pains, gains, and needs of both the internal organisation, the wider community, and the (potential) customers, it remains a hypothesis. To ensure successful long-term viability and growth, and prevent a possible crash- and -burn scenario when going mainstream, evolution takes place along all the axes. In each evolutionary phase (Explore, Evaluation, and Impact), different tools and strategies are applied along each of the eight key areas.

For more on Purpose Launchpad click here .

10. Circular design process

The Circular Design Process is a meta-methodology. The aim is to innovate products that reflect the principles of the circular economy. It is a design thinking process specialising in creating circular design products, services, and business models, originated by IDEO and the Ellen Macarthur Foundation. Premises of the methodology are that pressure to sell has led to a disregard for products' environmental impact, resulting in the need to extract more and more resources from the planet, increasing waste, worsening pollution, and consumerist behaviour.

The circular design process comprises four stages and incorporates approaches such as design thinking and human-centred design.

Understand. Get to know the user and the system.

Define. Put into words the design challenge and your intention as a designer.

Make. Ideate, design, and prototype as many iterations and versions as you can.

Release. Launch your design into the wild and build your narrative -; create loyalty in customers and deepen investment from stakeholders by telling a compelling story.

For each of the four phases, there are six methods with templates available on the Circular Design Guide, adapted to the Circular economy principles. In addition to these twenty-four, there are four advanced ones concerning the use of materials. The process may last from a couple of days to a month. It depends on the output you want to design. It's an iterative process, so many loops will be taken to develop learning and the right output.

For more on the circular design process click here .

We wish you lots of success using these methodologies to spark your online innovation initiatives. Ps. When you want to master an effective online innovation method, you might check out the next online FORTH training April 2022.

Let's innovate in 2022 100% online!

innovative regards,

Gijs