Functional Innovation Spaces - The Perfect Innovation Room [5min]

"Innovation here, Innovation there…" - we hear it everywhere!

Business trends are more volatile than ever before, and the current disruption trends will continue to grow as long as technology advances. I won’t explain you here why innovation is a top-priority these days, what I will do is share you a functional innovation space design that might empower you and your colleagues to release your inner genius.

If you take some time to check online for innovation or creative spaces, you will find a lot of inspiration on pinterest and several blogs filled with pictures and/or tips with lists of what to include. Here, you will see more than that, I’ll show you an innovation room concept!

First, lets agree on something: if you are designing a creative space or innovation room, promise me that you will create a functional space! (I trust you!) Basically, you can split most creative spaces in 2 mayor types, show-off & functional.

Show-off innovation spaces: These are the most common among big corporations. These rooms have cool decoration, fancy seats, maybe some drones and robots to check out and some whiteboards and post-its with materials to write. We can all agree that these look cool, but when it comes to empowering your colleagues to innovate, these rooms often fail. In short, these rooms usually look cool, can impress your customers and partly inspire its visitors.

Functional innovation spaces: These rooms can be less fancy than the show-off rooms and often have no tech-toys to show off. On the other hand, these rooms are heavily packed with creation materials and allow you to write and sketch everywhere. These rooms go as far as offering multiple ways of prototyping while still providing enough room-setups to satisfy different needs. In a sentence, these rooms are designed to be used for design thinking & making, design sprints and other types of workshops.

If you search online for innovation room images, you will find out that a significant amount of the results just look good but don’t add enough usability to the needed activities. Don’t believe me? Then let Jake Knapp tell you a reason why it’s important to have a room that enables showing and sharing ideas in multiple ways:

A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team. - Jake Knapp (SPRINT)

The Principles

In the last years, I’ve been in several dozens of workshops and have visited many show-off and a couple functional innovation rooms. As of now, I’m convinced that a fully functional innovation space should have 6 different modalities:

Think is the first place to start. This space should aid to think collectively and share the topic/challenge/idea by displaying it in a central place. Having a place to sit down and area to write works nice as a transitional space for the most conservative participants. The seat orientation should invite the participants to interact with each other. This is one of the stations where there should be lots of post-its and markers for writing.

Drawing and sketching are the leading activities in the Sketch section. Huge, rolling whiteboards, marker-friendly walls and surfaces are essential to allow anyone to write almost anywhere during this stage. There should be vertical (walls, whiteboards) and horizontal areas (marker-friendly tables) to sketch, so that all workshop members feel comfortable while drawing. Permanent-markers should be prohibited in the whole room.

Thinking and sketching consumes a lot of energy. During the breaks, many of us need to regain energy and that is why an area to Relax is imperative. Whether this area is used to take a quick power nap or rest comfortably, is up to the user to decide. This space is also used to escape any thinking-blockade by just providing some distance from the ongoing tasks and the opportunity to get back to work with a fresh mind.

The Build space is the core of the prototyping phase. Here, “workshop” is not just a word, it also becomes part of the room. Many of the most popular and dynamics ways of ideating, prototyping and efficiently communicating, involve making thoughts tangible. Here are some materials which will empower all participants to create tangible ideas:

Lights, camera, action! Coming out with a nice idea, solution or plan is just half of the job. A great idea is only great if others are able to understand it and its value. Creating a simple short-video is a great way to gain some attention, distribute, explain and sell an idea. It works better if the team working on the idea, records the footage for the video at the end of the workshop. You can Film with a smartphone and still have a nice looking video; the trick is to have good lightning and a good background. Often, “home-made”-quality videos get a lot of attention from colleagues willing to see their other colleagues who are featured in a video (free marketing!).

Welcome to the stage! If you prepared a short video with the features of your service/product, or if you have an early prototype, here’s the right place to show it to the whole group. The stage is a space designed to Explain and demonstrate functionalities of the results of the workshop. This area is designed to give all the viewers’ attention to the presenters. If you didn't wear a costume for the video, the stage is the perfect place to dress and act like the stakeholders from the idea. (e.g: customer, front-end service, service robot, an app, the manager, etc.)

The design

In the end, it’s all about having the right people, the right atmosphere and the right tools. I hope this post provides you enough arguments and inspiration to improve the last two points. At last, here is a fictional 100 square meters (approx. 1075 square feet) room, where it is possible to recognize how the different areas could look like in real world. Film & Explain share the same space, high-end PCs are on one side of the room, a couple refrigerators filled with snacks and drinks supply all visitors with energy, and all walls can be filled with post-its or drawings from non-permanent markers.

This small article derivates from the main article “Innovation is a state of mind” and is part of the innovation series that I’ll be publishing through 2018. This concept is still a “work in progress”; I’m more than happy to welcome your opinions, suggestions and constructive feedback.

If you made it this far… remember our promise: First make it functional, then you can show-off a bit!

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About the author:

Nelson Javier Mejia, is an industrial engineer and innovation enthusiast in his mid-20s, who is committed to making the world a better place to live and work.

Nelson gained international experience while working in Germany, El Salvador and India; he is open-minded and ready to discuss and research about the nature of business and industry processes, and about possible ways to improve them.