Innovation learning sprints

By James Jesty, Shape New Ideas

Innovation is typically managed in functional silos. Different expert teams are responsible for their piece of the pie. Marketing devise the strategy; market research own the consumer interactions and insight gathering; R&D the technical solution.

This approach forces innovation to operate like the 400m relay in a smoothly orchestrated sequence of hand-offs. You start with the strategy, you then gather insights, and once the insights are defined you then generate ideas and technical solutions which then get served back to consumers for evaluative research.

The problem is that often innovation isn’t like watching the Jamaicans run the 400m relay. There are often false starts, trips and spills. For example, the R&D folks may have some new, yet not fully formed ideas worth incubating to see if they address an unmet need. Or there may be some promising consumer insights, but you’re not sure if there is a solution that fits with your capability.

The fix is to think of innovation as a series of learning sprints where you cycle through insights and ideas as a x-functional team.

Put the user or consumer at the heart of these collaborative sprints, experimenting with early ideas and prototypes with them.

This approach is more agile, and helps you decode consumer needs into solutions and figure out what needs you are designing for.

The iterative nature of these sprints helps pressure test ideas quickly and spin off quick wins. It breaks down functional silos and creates high performing teams.