Snapshots from innovation projects

Defining innovation targets – The management team from a manufacturer of building equipment is gathered to define vision, measurable targets and characteristics of different development areas.

Front-loading – All projects that create new solutions lack information in the beginning. That is the nature of innovation. Front-loading – pulling knowledge forward – can be done by the team through identification/ brainstorming of all of the questions that come to mind when discussing the project objectives. Subsequently, the team splits up to find answers and share insights one or two weeks later. This example is from a project with the task of defining, planning and executing a large-scale event.

The ten types of innovation – Doblin’s great framework for seeing innovation from different perspectives. Here it is used as the basis for team discussion and idea generation in relation to possible ways of innovating three different concept options. Facilitating the process around a poster encourages all team members to participate and provides a good overview of the options.

The ten types of innovation – Close-up photo of generated concept alternatives. The assignment was to define possible ways for a manufacturer of power tools to adapt existing core products to a new segment. We split the consumer experience into ten areas and identified three "extreme" options (superior value, ease of use and product service) in order to expand the solution space.

Structured creativity – A bank used morphology to break down a pension product into its sub-components. For each component, the team developed a number of alternatives to get a better feeling for the desirable design space. For one sub-component, e.g. "customer status updates", the team examined the solutions: "no updates", "on-demand updates", "push-updates" and "luxury mail updates". Then they combined the many sub-solutions into realistic product concepts. By working in this manner, the team became more innovative because the creativity had a clear direction.

Visual planning – The visual plan is used for joint planning in the project team. It is used as a detailed short-term plan (8w) made on the basis of key milestones in the main plan. Each team member is responsible for a track and responsible for writing their own milestones and coordinating these with the other team members. Once a week, the team jointly updates the plan by ticking off completed milestones with a marker. Through focus, participation and motivation, visual planning allows a team to perform closer to its true potential.

Weekly status meeting – A project participant presents his completed milestones to his team colleagues. Taking turns, each team member briefly presents was has been accomplished in the previous week. Meetings are usually run as "stand-up meetings", and once the team is familiar with the process, they last less than 30 minutes.

Improvement meetings in discipline team – Not only in projects, but also in discipline teams or specialist units, visual boards can be used. Here a group follows up on portfolio status, generates process improvement ideas and defines improvement actions/projects. Similar to visual planning in projects, this process is carried out on a weekly basis and increases the commitment and direction of the work.