Phase III of Air Force Innovation: Find the Right Solutions and Show Success
After you have identified the proposed solution and engaged your core team, the next step in the Four Phases Innovation it is time to find the right partners to help you deliver it.
Successful delivery requires market research and a solid roll-out strategy, which also requires that you track and measure your progress. In this blog, we cover the steps you will need to take to bring your idea to end users, as well as the methods to begin to share and scale your solution.
Early on, you will need to establish metrics and goals early on so that you can determine whether your solution is working for your users. Make sure that your metrics are reality-based.
Your goal should not be to prove how great your idea is, rather to validate that you have found an effective solution to a common problem.
Conduct Market Research
Market research is the continuous process of collecting and analyzing data on products, services, business practices, and vendor capabilities to satisfy agency needs.
Simply put, it is learning about your environment to make informed decisions about the acquisition of goods and services.
There are numerous techniques to conduct market research. Traditional methods include sending out as Sources Sought notices and Requests for Information. There are also myriad “innovative” techniques to conducting market research that can help make your acquisition more effective.
Developing a Solid “Roll-Out” Strategy
Successful innovations do not happen overnight. They require adoption over time and, to achieve adoption over time, you need to have a strategy.
By recognizing that adoption over time relies on early adopters, part of your strategy needs to include efforts to gain feedback, information, and support from those individuals. During the early-adoption phase, you can adjust your innovative product or service to improve your solution.
Your strategy needs to acknowledge that rolling out to a broader group of users requires different approaches to increase awareness; overcome inertia, doubt, and uncertainty; and promote adoption. Universal adoption of your idea is achievable by thinking and mapping a plan to make the idea stick and then spread.
Deliver, Track Progress & Show Success!
This is the fun part of innovation and improvement: actually seeing whether your proposed solution can solve needs.
Effective delivery requires measurement to ensure that you are on the right track. You’ll need both quantitative and qualitative metrics to guide your work.
Although there is no single set of metrics that will be appropriate for all solutions, the metrics should tie back to both value to the user and impact on mission. You can’t improve that in which you cannot measure.
Quantitative metrics such as customer adoption, satisfaction, burden reduction, improved speed to mission, or cost reductions are all important, but qualitative metrics are also important for defining impact.
For example, even if adoption is limited in the early stages, if Airmen have a particularly strong emotional reaction — whether positive or negative — to a proposed solution, that is a useful indicator of future impact.
Even more important than metrics, though, is the process of observing users interacting with the proposed solution. By observing carefully how the solution is working “in the real world,” you can gain important insights into ways to improve the proposed solution or identify new pain points that can help lead to more valuable innovations.
Regardless of what you measure, or how, you should make sure to make observations and document your findings. Through this process, you will have the critical information you need to make the case for continued funding or investment and receive additional inputs for new innovations.
It is perhaps more important to record when a solution doesn’t achieve the outcomes that you expected.
As Thomas Edison observed “I have not failed 10,000 times — I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
The essential thing is to stay focused on your vision, track your progress, and report your results. Doing this repeatedly leads to success.
Ready to move on to Phase IV? See our next blog on preparing to scale problems during the Air Force Innovation Process.
Check out our Innovation Handbook for more in-depth information on how to innovate in your organization.
