What’s An Innovation Workshop And Why We Do It?
As explained by Henry Chesbrough in The Era of Open Innovation, organizations are “increasingly rethinking the fundamental ways in which they generate ideas and bring them to market — harnessing external ideas while leveraging their in-house R&D outside their current operations.” Chesbrough continues, “the boundary between a firm and its surrounding environment is more porous, enabling innovation to move easily between the two.” Much like open-source initiatives, open innovation generates an increasingly more diverse scope of innovation than any company is capable of developing and sustaining long term.
At Mount Sinai Co-Lab, we convene ecosystem stakeholders and partners through a diversified selection of open innovation programming such as Innovation Pop-ups, Innovator Dinners, Office Hours, and Workshops. These programming opportunities are a great way for us to showcase innovation at Mount Sinai Health System (MSHS). Most recently we hosted our Innovation In Healthcare Pop-Up in London.
We prioritize speed to learning and insights, and we run abbreviated innovation workshops with individuals and organizations with whom we’ve aligned in order to identify new opportunities to partner and collaborate with MSHS. An innovation workshop is a facilitated session that focuses participants on brainstorming, problem identification, and rapid prototyping of solutions. The three-hour workshop is centered around design thinking methodology with a solution-based approach to solving business problems. Design thinking is important because it helps service unmet needs; it reduces the risk associated with launching new ideas and helps organizations learn faster. According to IDEO, the three essential pillars to design thinking are:
- Empathy — Understanding the needs of those you’re designing for.
- Ideation — Generating a lot of ideas. Brainstorming is one technique, but there are many others.
- Experimentation — Testing those ideas with prototyping.
When done right, design thinking can help quickly identify testable next steps with a partner with the end-goal of creating innovative new solutions. We take inspiration from many different exercises and frameworks that help us understand the problem we are solving for. Below is one gamestorming exercise and co-creation tool, Building Partnerships, we have used to facilitate past innovation workshops:
Game: Building Partnerships
Made popular by Dave Gray, the partnership canvas is a tool that enables the visualization of future collaborations and early testing of a partnership between two partnership candidates. The tool’s purpose is to define your business’ priority for partnering and empathize with your partner to explore whether there is a potential match. Below are the main areas to examine prior to defining the next steps to effectuate the partnership:
Define Intent
Describe the aim or goal of the partnership for your business. List who would be ideal partners to work with and why.
Design Partnership
Each team identifies its desired assets in their respective partner’s business model. Teams sketch out a partnership canvas from their own team’s perspective using sticky notes to define each building block.
Negotiate
Each team presents and compares the two partnership canvasses by mirroring the partnership perspectives. Is there a mutual understanding of the transfer activities? Check for a clear fit.
Define Next Steps
Assess if the elements of created value provide added value to each partner’s business. Define next steps.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Co-Lab and how to drive innovation forward in healthcare, fill out a Contact Form and follow us on Twitter.
The Mount Sinai Co-Lab is an open innovation program designed to find solutions to healthcare challenges that have the potential to impact health globally. Solving tomorrow’s healthcare challenges requires today’s preeminent organizations to interface with healthcare systems in ways that they haven’t needed to in the past. The Co-Lab fosters long-term partnership between preeminent organizations and Mount Sinai’s forward-thinking leadership, faculty, and students. Participating organizations are matched with a navigator, a Connector-In-Residence across the Mount Sinai Health System that helps hone in on nodes of value and activate the right Mount Sinai resources to optimize partnership.
