Ideas aren’t enough on their own, how early validation was crucial to our work with the Mobility Aids Service
This spring, the Red Cross Mobility Aids Service (MAS) team approached the Innovation Hub with a challenge — to help them find new ways to expand their presence in the community whilst keeping property costs to a minimum. We jumped at the opportunity to bring the creativity and rigour of our innovation process to this challenge. We immersed ourselves in the service, worked with the staff and volunteers to come up with new ideas, and spent time investigating whether these ideas have legs. All within five weeks. Impressive, right? So how did we do it?
Our goal was to deliver a shortlist of ideas for expanding the presence of MAS, with evidence of reasons to believe in each idea. Using our tried and tested innovation process, we got to work!
Determining the challenge/opportunity
We often think we know the challenge we’re trying to solve, but our perception of the problem can be full of assumptions and biases. If we assumed our challenge was about reducing property costs, then the answer would surely be to close some of our properties — but where does that leave our service users? By taking a human-centred approach to the challenge (putting our service users at the centre), we found it was really about reaching our service users in innovative ways…that allowed us to reduce property costs as a result.
Discover — understanding the needs of our users
Continuing on the theme of putting our users at the centre, before thinking of any ideas, we needed to understand what our service users would need from a location and also what the service (including our staff and volunteers) would need from a location. We interviewed staff, volunteers & service users and visited some our sites to really understand the needs and challenges, that will later inform our idea generation.
Synthesis — generate insights from what we learnt
Woah — what do we do with all of this information? We collate it all, identify key themes and turn these into 5–6 key insights. At this point, we also reframe our challenge statement into a question for the rest of the innovation process — which we identified as “How might we find innovative and viable ways of reaching people who need a mobility aid, at the time they need it”. Only now were we ready to come up with ideas with our MAS colleagues.
Ideation — generate ideas that meet the needs of the user and the service
Making the most of the chance to be together in person, we brought staff and volunteers from across the service into ideation workshops. To keep our users at the centre, we created personas and ‘a week in the life of a service user’ journeys with the team. With these journeys front of mind, we brainstormed innovative ways of reaching those service users, generating over 100 ideas ranging from partnerships, to pop-ups, to collaboration with other BRC services. Using a set of prioritisation criteria (difficulty to implement, impact on the service and alignment to scope), we whittled the list down to a longlist of around 17.
Test — complete early validation of ideas
Stay with me, this is where it gets really interesting. We couldn’t just present some nice ideas, we needed early validation that these ideas could work in practice, so we set upon these ideas like investigative journalists; Googling, Linked-In searching and rinsing our personal address books to find experts to talk to. From COOs of National institutions, to Social Enterprise Directors, to storage solution salespeople, we had fascinating chats with 25 experts in one week to find out whether these ideas could work or not. From these conversations, we killed ideas that wouldn’t work in practice, and further shortlisted those that could, based on difficulty and impact. This left us with seven ideas to progress, with three potential partners already offering the opportunity to pilot with them!
And there we have it! Five weeks of living, breathing & understanding MAS resulting in a set of ideas with early validation completed.
So what next? Early validation is only the first step of testing — there is still more rigorous testing that needs to take place to decide which ideas to pilot. Quick, simple versions of the concept that test the viability of the idea are essential before you move onto the piloting stage where you may need more investment.
The role of the innovation hub will now move to that of a coach, supporting our colleagues in MAS to design clear tests for these ideas and offering advice as they move into the pilot stage of the innovation journey. We can’t wait to see the results!
