Innovation from within | Is it possible to find good ideas at scale?
How can teams innovate within the company in a genuine way? A look inside to make a step outside the box and move towards transformative digital growth that enhances company’s productivity.
If you put 12 people in a room from various company units and ask them to list all the problems they are facing, probably under within an hour you would have a pretty long list to go thru. Experienced workers can quickly identify most of the operational, logistical, and administrative challenges of a company. While this list provides valuable insights, it’s essential to be able to identify the most critical issues with reasonable efforts. More importantly, can we think of any good ideas that can address these problems? And will our proposed solutions yield wanted results?
In this article I will dive deep into the mechanisms that incite innovation. Keep reading if you are someone that’s trying to innovate within a company be it by transforming mindset or by creating and implementing new products.
Instead of creating long lists can we do it better?
Yes, thankfully by adopting systemic and human-centric approaches for solving problems, we can efficiently extract insight in reasonable time from a minimum sample needed. Human-centric approach campaigns that we should always keep in mind what the person wants and needs. We should continually ask ourselves: ‘What do our users, including internal employees, require to improve their performance and better serve our clients and stakeholders?’
System thinking teaches us to view problems holistically, rather than focusing solely on symptom analysis. By looking for root causes and understanding how problems are interconnected, we can develop more effective solutions. This approach is often referred to as ‘seeing the bigger picture.’ For example, when addressing warehouse overflow, system thinking might involve examining factors like shipping documents, work orders documents, context of warehouse workers, rather than simply focusing on building bigger warehouses.
The approach: Creating space for conversations
Design is renowned for bringing people together on account of its principles collaboration, and co-design. The seamless collaboration of sharing ideas and opinions no matter the ranking and hierarchy. What design thinking method does well it uses simple tools to process divergent and convergent thinking. This happens particularly well in a workshop-like circumstances.
So, yes put 12 people in a room but in a designerly manner. Don’t make them do lists of problems but make them think about root causes and opportunities. Use affinity mapping to declutter and decompose complicated problems. The ‘needs’ should become challenges to solve and an anchor for opportunities. Most of the times if problems are not shared in systemic manner, it’s hard for the group to understand where their efforts should be focused.
How Eni’s operational business put it in practice?
When one of the Eni’s operational businesses wanted to drive innovation on the digital front, they were not sure how to approach it inclusively at first. That’s how a collaboration between digital & tech partners and the design team came to be. Together, we identified 4 areas of interest to explore: production, production management, maintenance, and warehouse management. The aim was to bring together small groups of very busy people and give them time and place to converse about their problems and opportunities.
Here are the 5 phases of the approach we adopted and executed:
1. Discovery — Preliminary research to gather additional qualitative data.
2. Opportunity — Starting from the right problems we can identify innovation opportunities.
3. Design — Co-design with the users themselves.
4. Prototype — Try it out, see what works better and how it feels to the users.
5. Test & Validation — Test it and validate it with users and stakeholders.
During the discovery phase, we interviewed people from various business units to map out their daily tasks, gaining a broader perspective on responsibilities, processes, and more. In the opportunity phase, we employed participatory design techniques. We gathered individuals from the four areas of interest in a room to work together in groups and discuss challenges based on journey maps derived from the interviews. The working group created idea cards and collaboratively selected the most promising ones. Subsequently, tech experts, UX designers, and digital professionals joined the groups to co-design a potential digital product. Together, they envisioned a future journey for the product, detailed its features, and designed the desired user experience. The team then proceeded to create a low-code or no-code prototype to test functionalities and user experience before industrializing the product.
Conditions for a good innovation — What makes a difference?
While the design thinking approach can help solve many problems, blindly applying it without considering specific conditions may limit the discovery of breakthrough ideas. To foster true innovation, it’s essential to account for the conditions and environment needed to support and inspire creative thinking.
In every step of the process, you should keep in mind the following questions:
- Is this the right problem we should be solving?
- Is this idea considering the user needs?
- Is this idea beneficial for the business overall?
- Can we scale up the design?
Moving to action, we need to implement tangible conditions that enable innovation at every stage. Start by creating a clear vision and well-defined goals. This vision should guide the entire innovation process, ensuring that everyone is aligned and working towards the same objectives. Continuous learning is pivotal. The employees need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies and keep their minds open to new possibilities. Additionally, collaboration across different departments and teams is key to encourage the sharing of ideas and knowledge. This also means being open to changing processes when we need to adapt to new conditions. Lastly, diffused ownership is a way of advocating for new ideas, garnering support, and driving change. Everyone needs to feel they can propose and discuss an idea.
The requirements for an advantageous innovation in a company environment:
- Having an open mind and creative attitude.
- Having introduced the variety and the right skillset in the group.
- Awareness and know-how of technological potential.
- Build the right partnerships within and outside the company when needed.
- Being timely, in decisions and concept proofing.
- Having set the right conditions for collaboration.
- Never exclude the user (employees) out of the conversation.
- Being able to showcase your findings and ideas to stakeholders and broader users.
- Engagement in advocating our solution based on strong evidence and support of our stakeholders and users.
To generate truly innovative ideas, it’s essential to embrace diversity of thought. It’s not enough to bring people together. While collaboration among like-minded individuals that also have similar responsibilities can be productive, incorporating a tech or digital expert can elevate the process. These figures, actively engaged in discussions and ideation sessions, can provide a unique perspective, challenging assumptions and offering novelty previously unknown to the ‘base’ group.
Here are additional questions to always keep in mind:
- Are there any partnerships we should be building?
- Are we bringing new ideas in? Are we engaging with tech experts?
What is a good idea?
Now, that you have your ideas, you must choose the best ones. The best ideas should usually adhere to these 3 criteria:
· useful for the users
· feasible for the business
· and have measurable benefits in terms of cost reduction or productivity enhancement
To find a “good idea” you should avoid competition-like-decision-making that is based on some sort of rigid metric. It is better to opt for few ideas that can be scaled according to the available budget. A good idea represents a valuable opportunity for the business.
“What is a good digital opportunity?
When an idea addresses a genuine need or problem that can be leveraged by digital technologies to a scalable and impactful solution, and it demonstrates potential for both business value and user and/or employee experience.”
Concept proofing: How Eni’s operational business choose the most viable ideas?
Finally, after thorough looking and analysis our working group introduced to the stakeholders four ideas from four different areas of interest, each worth pursuing. Through strong collaboration with digital, tech and design experts, leveraging their extensive technology knowledge, and building and testing the prototypes, the business gained a clear understanding of potential next steps. Surprisingly, not all ideas needed to be developed from scratch. Some could evolve from existing products, others could be customized from market solutions and some would need to be custom-built.
The concept proofing process is essential for obtaining measurable insights into the advantages of your idea. It helps you advocate for your idea with management, wider user base, and partners. Ideally, this should be done by someone who is deeply familiar with the product, understands its design, its advantages. In our E2E products, the advocates are the employees themselves who envisioned the product.
In the last phases of our process, we should also do the following checks:
- Are we considering the bigger picture?
- Did our stakeholders understand the value?
Conclusion
Teams that work closely together often lack a broader perspective, focusing primarily on their immediate tasks and operational challenges. Systemic design approach can help address this by taking a holistic approach, examining businesses, teams, and problems within the context of a larger system. This broader view enables identification of systemic issues and opportunities for innovation.
As designers, our goal should be to guide the team toward a near-to-flawless user experience journey for a solution to be, regardless the technology. The priority should be on addressing user needs, helping the client focus on real business issues, and distinguishing between process-related and tool-related problems.
Often, issues arise when digital tools are outdated, overly complex or burdened by significant design debt, forcing teams to develop time-consuming workarounds. Another common issue is the lack of digital tools to automate tasks such as combining and handling large datasets. Teams frequently develop impressive skills in manually managing and manipulating vast amounts of information. While this can be admirable, it can also lead to a situation where these manual processes become normalized, hindering innovation and efficiency. By questioning the status quo and exploring potential automation and innovation opportunities, teams can free up time and resources for more strategic work.
Therefore, yes innovation can come within! It greatly helps if we cultivate cross-collaboration with new tech & digital experts to harvest the potential of new technologies. Keeping an open mind and a big-picture vision in mind is where we should start. Finding the right problems to solve first and ensuring the business, the final user, is always included in product design discussions is fundamental. Lastly but of equal importance, showcasing the value and advocating the use cases to stakeholders is crucial for gaining support, feedback, and accelerating adoption!
