The beauty of innovation is that many innovation and creativity techniques will work to elicit and organize ideas. Many of the techniques and processes listed below are organized forms of brainstorming. They enable groups to look at problems and opportunities in new ways.
Challenging
In the higher education industry thirty years ago, the industry norms were:
• Students came to campus.
• Most students were in their late teens and early twenties.
• Professors were content experts.
• Classes were conducted during weekdays.
• Professors lectured content that only a few people were privy to, and students took notes.
• Students were almost all white and American-born.
Look at what has happened in recent decades. Online education programs allow 68 year-old students from East Podunk to earn undergraduate or graduate degrees. Students can access the same content as professors on the Internet. The professor transforms from the “expert” to the connector of information and knowledge guide. Education happens anywhere and anytime between students from different generations and continents. Industry assumptions have been successfully challenged.
Innovation begins by challenging or questioning the status quo, using a statement such as: the world can be better with a____. We can challenge or question the world, a product line, or an existing group of products as they are. A manager might have a group of employees challenge all of the industry norms, asking: What are those things that all members of this industry take for granted? What beliefs are true no matter what? What are the stable drivers of the industry, or the foundations that make the industry tick? In these challenges might be the next big industry innovations.
Resource: Tom Kelley’s
The Art of Innovation
This book explains how the product design company Ideo performs fast prototyping.
Challenging can happen also at a smaller level. A group may list all of their assumptions about a product or a business problem, then systematically challenge those assumptions. Or they can reverse those assumptions, posing questions such as: What if the opposite were true? These challenges pry open assumptions to shine a light on other possibilities that might lead to significant innovations.
Flowcharts
Flowcharting is not new, but has been popularized by the quality movements. Flowcharting lists sequential steps of a process, and divides them into decisions or actions. A team then can scrutinize each of the steps and question the necessity of each by asking: What steps do our employees go through to get a piece of work done? Do we need this step? Can the task be performed in another more efficient way? If a manager asks a group to try to innovate an existing process as a whole, individuals may be overwhelmed by its complexity. By breaking the process down into its component parts, each step becomes more manageable, understandable, and ultimately improved.
(Flowchart here)
Customer-focused Flowchart
Traditional flowcharting focuses on the process from the viewpoint of the organization. One can reverse this to list the steps that a customer goes through to use its product or service. For instance, to enjoy a dinner out at a restaurant, I must identify the restaurant, find it, park, be seated, identify an excellent menu item, order, be served (in a timely fashion), eat, be given a bill, pay the bill, and leave. At each step in this process, what can go wrong? In a customer-focused flowchart process, a restaurant owner considers, at each step, how to make this experience a delightful one. How about a valet service for parking, or a waiting area with a fish tank and coloring books and crayons to delight my children? How about free hors d’oeuvres if I have to wait more than 15 minutes?
The three steps of customer-focused flowcharting are fairly clear:
• What steps do our customers or clients go through when using our product or service?
• At each step, what can go wrong?
• At each of these steps, what can we do to ensure customer delight?
Improvement may require minor tweaks or major innovations. You will never know until you brainstorm for solutions.
A variation of this approach is to use a template of the customer process in order to look for innovations. The template typically contains these steps:
• Selection
• Order process
• Delivery
• Learning How to Use
• Use
• Reorder
• Maintenance
• Disposal
Now, how can a company delight its customers at each of these steps? How can it make each of these steps seamless, easy, effortless, uncomplicated, uplifting, delightful, amazing, and exciting? Successful companies do this meticulously.
A friend experienced this type of customer-centric service at Disneyworld several years ago:
After spending a few days in one of the Disney resorts in Orlando, I received a phone message: I had left a pair of cheap, Mexican shorts behind. Did I want them to send the shorts? Of course, this was not just a lost and found call, but a marketing connection—they reminded me that I visited Disney World, asked me how I enjoyed my trip, and let me know that they wanted me to return.
Try This!
Have a team at your organization create a customer-centric flowchart. Choose a process that a customer proceeds through. Walk through these steps on a big piece of paper:
• What steps do our customers or clients go through when using our product or service?
• At each step, what can go wrong?
• At each of these steps, what can we do to ensure customer delight?
Post this chart on a bulletin board for all to see. Perhaps it will encourage others to do the same.