A Journey to Pathology 3.0: Strategic Innovation, part 3

Although the term "focus group" entered the mainstream business jargon in the early 1990s, radio broadcasters had already used this tool for market research for nearly five decades. Essentially, a focus group is a qualitative research method which uses a small group of participants with common characteristics or experiences relevant to the study topic. The idea is to stimulate participant interaction to explore divergent perspectives, group dynamics or other influences. The exchange of thoughts and opinions can stimulate new ideas, uncover shared experiences, and generate more profound insights. Focus groups differ from ‘day-out events’ and ‘regular groups’. ‘Day-outs’ are networking corporate festivities, and ‘regular groups’ serve different operational or governance purposes.

As it’s in the name, focus groups focus on specific topics. Their composition and discussion are carefully planned to create an environment where people are actively encouraged to express their opinions rather than feeling pressured into a consensus. ?Effective focus group events are chaired by skilled moderators, not line managers or organisation leaders.

A few weeks ago, I attended an excellent focus group on earlier diagnostics commissioned by IBMS and organised by PA Consulting. It demonstrated that a focus group could be a powerful innovation scoping and refining tool if the event is purposefully organised and chaired by a good moderator. When conducted well, the expressive nature of the method enables testing new ideas, ?generating a lot of intelligence, and detecting emerging trends relatively quickly.

This approach is helpful in the busy, fragmented, and often shy world where pathology leaders may need to work hard to extract very good ideas from colleagues who may not have experience or self-confidence or simply do not thrive in large, ‘open-platform’ environments.

It can also help avoid tunnel vision and a narrow view of innovation, often limited to technology, assays or products. As we said last week, innovation can emerge from any part of our ecosystem, and successful breakthroughs often span multiple interconnected 'habitats' within it. Ten Type Innovation is a handy framework for keeping focused when exploring opportunities outside the traditional comfort zone.

The framework describes ten domains of innovation, organised into three broad categories: Configuration, Offering and Experience.

The configuration comprises the organisation's internal workings and business model. It includes:

-????? Financial Model, or how the organisation manages its finances and makes money,

-????? Network, or the way it creates with others to create value

-????? Structure, or the way to organise and align talents and assets and

-????? Process or methods for doing work

Offering covers critical aspects of the products and services that the organisation offers to its users;

-????? Product Performance, or how to develop distinguishing features and functionalities

-????? Product Systems, or creating complementary products or services ?

Customer experience focuses on the outward-facing elements of the business; its components are:

-????? Service, or how to support and amplify the value of an organisation’s offerings

-????? Channel, or the way the offerings are delivered to users

-????? Brand, or representation of the organisation’s offerings and business

-????? Customer Engagement, or how to foster distinctive interactions with customers and users

One of the roles of the leaders is to channel the intellectual energy of the team to innovate across the whole spectrum, and focus groups are valuable tools for getting over ‘innovator’s blocks’ in specific domains. ?

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