How To Apply Incubation To Your Innovation Projects

Welcome, firstly to my newsletter Growth Through Innovation, and secondly to part four of a series on the importance of creative thinking at work and how to unleash it in yourself and your teams.

Today I’m going to share with you how and when to apply the power of the subconscious and incubation to your innovation projects in order to boost your team's creativity and idea generation capacity!

Incubation is when you allow a problem to churn around below the threshold of consciousness, and the longer you incubate the greater the quality and number of ideas you’ll have.

When I’m running innovation projects with my clients, I build in some incubation time for the teams following the distillation of the customer discovery research and before the idea generation stage and workshops. That way they get to incubate on the customer problems you’ve identified and want to focus on.

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Circulate Creative Briefs

I start by sending the Creative Briefs out to all the participants of the ideate stage in advance of the idea generation workshops — either give each team the full set or just the briefs they’ll work on in the ideation workshops.

A Creative Brief is an area of focus for incubation and idea generation that is derived from your customer research and insights, and you’ve crafted into an inspiring brief. It typically includes:

1. a headline
2. context and/or a customer insight that sets the scene and gives some explanation to the situation and the customer need or problem
3. a number of 'how might we' questions to provide different ways into the solution.

Set yourself and the teams the task of being their true selves, letting go and having fun or finding a space where they can do this (see last week’s newsletter for more information on how to do this).

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Conduct Incubation Activities

Then, either individually or collectively, choose some incubation activities (see last week’s newsletter for a full list), such as going for a walk in an inspiring environment or visiting stores from a totally different category. Alternatively, you can bring the inspiration to you and your team, such as bring in guest speakers from a parallel industry. In the past when working on a food innovation project we’ve brought in the editor from a food magazine, chefs from different restaurants, nutritionists and subject matter experts to talk about trends and insights they are seeing in the industry.

You can also design set activities for each creative brief and/or a day out of the office for your team to go on a creative safari like this one we did for Sainsbury’s in London quite a few years ago.

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Incubation at Sainsbury’s

We were working for Sainsbury’s on their produce and bakery categories. The brief was all about helping them be better known for freshness in these categories. So, we designed a day out of the office for ourselves and the Sainsbury team. We prepared for the day by doing some desk research on places around London that did ‘freshness’ really well. Places such as florists, fresh food delis, bakers, fishmongers, even day spas. We then created safari packs for each team, which included a list of places to visit including directions on how to get there plus a London tube map. We all met up in London bright and early in the morning and headed out to track down and explore our target locations.

At the fishmonger’s we got talking to them about freshness — what freshness meant to them and how did they ‘do fresh’? They started telling us about how they only bought their fish fresh from day boats. ‘What is a day boat?’ was our next question. They explained that day boats go out each morning and come back every night with their fresh catch, whereas other boats go out for longer (several days or weeks at a time) and have big freezers on board where they freeze their catch. So, by only buying from day boats the fishmonger was able to sell the freshest fish possible. So, we wondered, what if Sainsbury’s baked their bread fresh every day and sourced their ingredients from within a day’s travel? They could then promote this to their shoppers, and it would be a good way of supporting their positioning around freshness. Nowadays all supermarkets bake their bread daily and food miles has become a big trend, but at the time it was a great way of differentiating themselves in the market and building their story around freshness.

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Pro Tip:

Remind team members they are to jot down all ideas they have during their incubation activities, no matter how unformed they are. A simple way to do this is to provide each team member with an inspiration template like the figure below.

Thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed it, please like and/or reshare, and add your thoughts and questions into the comments or DM me.

Happy innovating,

Nathan

#creativityatwork #creativethinking #innovation #productdiscovery