Throughout my career playing different roles with innovation centres, I was often asked about what is the best innovation process? Clearly there is no “the best model” but only “the right model” for organisations. After doing further research and study, I would like to give my attempts to the question. I believe there are two models — the first model is an established model whilst the second one is a self-improvised model.
The first model is the linear model. This is what I went through during my tenure in Microsoft and Konica Minolta. Under this model, innovation process in enterprises involves a sequential phases and run in such a way that an idea/project/initiative need to clear the “gate” of the preceding phase before advancing to the next. The linear model is good at minimising risk by “freezing” bad ideas at early stage. This model is also known as stage gate process where a gatekeeper (group of individuals) is commissioned to decide whether objectives in preceding phase are met or not before advancing to next phase. However this step by step approach is time consuming yet ineffective. Customer needs and market requirements that are defined earlier in the process may get obsolete over the period of waiting for approval and review. Nonetheless stage gate process is a safer approach and well-suited for play-safe organisations.
The second model is the agile model. The agile model is not an entirely new model, it is rather an enhancement to the linear model by incorporating proven agile practices, in turn making the innovation process more adaptable to changes. Below are three well-known agile practices that are utilised for different purposes:
Scrum
Scrum is commonly used in agile software development. Items from product backlog are selected by team members into sprint backlog based on their complexity and priority. The backlog items are then broke down into tasks. Once all members agree with the list, the sprint starts (typically 2 to 4 weeks) and the team executes on the sprint backlog. At the end of the sprint, the team demonstrates their work and collect retrospective for next sprint. Sprint continuously create potentially shippable incremental product. The entire cycle is repeated for next sprint and eventually produce a fully functional product. Scrum is very popular because it provides visibility and flexibility to learn and improve. A traditional project using waterfall method often has a long lifecycle (6 to 12 months) while a Scrum project produces incremental result in 2 weeks sprints.
Lean Startup
Lean startup focuses on Build→Measure→Learn. It promotes a continuous loop or learning, analysing and developing as the thinking behind is to get back to Build as quickly as possible after learning from the customers. The quicker ones can get through this cycle, the faster they can learn what the market wants, in turn increase the success rate of building a sustainable business. Lean Startup utilizes a “get out of the building” approach known as customer development. Firstly the founder needs to perform customer discovery by himself to verify and turn his initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. The second part is customer validation where the founder attempts to sell to early customers before scaling sales and marketing spending.
Design Thinking
Design thinking emphasises understanding the problem space and developing empathy with users before attempting to solve the problem. Unlike Lean Startup which starts with the founder’s vision, design thinking starts with user needs. After understanding the users thru interview, observation or even attempting the activity, findings are synthesised and produced into persona, empathy map and customer journey map. These artefacts subsequently help the team to brainstorm new ideas to solve the problem. Prototype then built and tested with the users to identify the right solution. Compared with Lean Startup, design thinking is a better fit in finding innovative solutions for non engineering-driven problems. Hence it is largely popular with both non-tech and tech giants as the formal innovation process.
In my view, the structured approach of stage gate process can be morphed into an agile model by taking in the proven agile practices, as shown in the figure below:
Under the agile model, design thinking is applied early in the innovation process to identify pain points and build rapid prototype that satisfies the user’s needs. The outcome subsequently fulfills one of the three criterias of Concept Feasibility phase, namely user desirability, aside from business viability and technology feasibility. As Business Design phase requires working beyond business model generation, testing initial hypotheses using Customer Development model is valuable in identifying the product/market fit. If the hypotheses are indeed incorrect, it is highly encouraged to “revisit” prior phases to solidify its customer and product understanding. During Market Testing phase, customer validations are carried out iteratively to improve product positioning and company positioning before go-to-market. For product development, it is recommended that Scrum is implemented as it helps development team to embrace changing requirements and deliver finished work frequently.
Continuous interaction with the users and within the team differentiates the agile model from the linear model. It also has an edge in minimising the impact of failure as it allows fail fast in the beginning (project is killed if solution doesn’t address the pain points) and fail less in the later phase (solution can be fine-tuned as long as it addresses the right pain points).
As a good read, I strongly recommend this article authored by Steve Blank (the father of customer development): https://hbr.org/2017/09/what-your-innovation-process-should-look-like.
Source
- https://steveblank.com/2014/07/30/driving-corporate-innovation-design-thinking-customer-development/
- https://hbr.org/2013/05/why-the-lean-start-up-changes-everything
- https://www.inc.com/the-real-benefit-of-design-thinking.html
- https://www.slideshare.net/VijayKrKhurana/innovation-process-models
- https://www.slideshare.net/sblank/092409-class-5-and-6/6-Customer_Discovery_Hypotheses_Product_Customer
- https://www.visualstudio.com/learn/what-is-scrum/
