1. Embrace and maintain a culture of innovation
Developing an innovation process for an organization is like doing a group project. It entails bringing together individuals with diverse expertise and backgrounds. The designated leader pushes the team to complete tasks, and hopefully, no one is slacking off.
But the most important thing that can power a group project is a good culture from the word ‘go’.
If you think about what a culture of innovation is, your mind might wander to engineering labs or vibrant open-plan workspaces, bustling with a group of inventive minds tirelessly working to tackle complex challenges. And while that sounds cool, innovation culture is a way of thinking.
A culture of innovation is an environment in which creativity and creative problem-solving are encouraged throughout the organization. It is a setting that fosters collaboration and encourages employees to think outside the box when it comes to generating new ideas or solving existing problems.
When a company embraces this culture, everyone has permission to experiment with innovation projects and make mistakes without fear of repercussion or punishment.
2. Structure your innovation pipeline
An innovation pipeline is a strategic framework for businesses to achieve their objectives by integrating innovative methodologies and processes into their operations.
This may just sound like a lot of big words; so let’s break that down with an example.
Imagine you’re a tech company that sells computers and phones. You work in one of the most saturated and competitive industries out there, with competitors releasing new features and functionality what seems like constantly. So, you’ve always got to be delivering something unique and innovative to remain relevant.
So how do you do that? You build an innovation pipeline.
This pipeline serves as the foundation for your innovation program. It defines how your team develops new product ideas, how you choose which ideas will become prototypes, and how you collaborate with your key stakeholders to build the product concepts.
So, essentially, an innovation pipeline makes your innovation strategy real; it sets out how you focus on solving real customer problems. Building an innovation pipeline is all about coming up with and developing new ideas, but none of these tasks can be achieved without the right corporate culture.
How Dig approaches the innovation pipeline
We’ve got a specific outlook on how innovation works best. This method lets us ideate, refine, re-test, and move into product development quickly and easily.
Here’s what each step looks like:
This process has helped many of our clients launch great innovation projects.
3. Learn to conduct research the agile way
Back in the day, market research was often considered a one-off task. Traditionally, when companies wanted to launch an innovation, they’d conduct a single piece of research: testing a few ideas, choosing the best-performing one, and launching it.
This approach took a long time, was costly, and, honestly, didn’t always mean that the final innovation was even that impactful. Thankfully, today, many tools can help you innovate quicker, easier and cheaper. These tools allow insights pros to approach research the agile way.
The agile movement is derived from the software development world. It begins with collecting consumer feedback as early as possible by releasing a minimally viable product (MVP).
So, agile means iteratively adapting or improving your product based on customer feedback. In reality, your product may be more challenging to update than software! So, in many industries (including market research), agility means leveraging market research to test ideas early and optimize them before launch.
If we compare this to a more traditional approach (i.e., a big, expensive, long research project with no real iteration), the agile method clearly wins out. It gets you to profitable, interesting concepts quicker.
Agility isn’t about conducting cheap and fast research. While keeping costs as low as possible and getting to answers quickly are essential for many brands, agility is primarily about learning, adapting, and moving forwards.
