How to help companies to see innovation from the inside out?

I see a lot of companies having a hard time in making their ideas tangible and, more than that, difficulty in bringing together the research department and the business area. Questions like: how to transform research investments in commercial results? How to bring areas closer and make them see the value of research for business?

Big companies rely on technology and research centers within them, but often searched materials are mainly theoretical, or specific, as the discovery of a new chemical component, for example. Not only that but adding it to a considerable number of researches happening at the same time. But how to find business value and bring research and business departments together with such a technical study?

The job of a User Experience Specialist must happen at this moment, to help companies to organize themselves and to find innovation that has been waiting to be released. This professional has the necessary expertise to clear ideas and to foment creativity. Helping people understand and find the value on what they’re producing. The UX role will support the company in the exercise of seed creativity among employees.

Creativity is the ability to create, produce, or invent new things. Through creativity, it’s possible to transform situations and innovate, even when it comes to acting facing challenges. There’s no doubt that creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship walk side by side, before having innovation it’s necessary to be creative, it’s necessary to use creativity.

Some companies, a lot of times intentionally, impose a “fear of making a mistake” culture, which makes employees be afraid of taking risks, resulting in loss of trust and creativity. At the end of the year, Apple published a video encouraging creative people to share their ideas without the fear of judgment. With the fear of non-acceptance from others, people don’t expose their ideas, letting innovative solutions to die.

Creativity can be taught, and there are techniques that serve as a trigger to help people to be more creative. More than listing the techniques used, we must think about the different ways people think and act towards adverse situations.

There are many types of intelligence, making people learn and understand in different ways. Howard Gardner highlights 8 types of multiple intelligence: logical-mathematical, spatial, linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, bodily-kinesthetic, and musical. This set of abilities serves to understand the combinations and logical relations that human beings make to learn and relate things. It also helps to understand how to work the expertise of each individual, exercising different forms of thinking and developing multiple abilities that help in the solution of various problems. Working and exercising these different forms will help people to think and understand in different ways, which helps when it comes to being creative.

Encourage creativity makes people more innovative and entrepreneurs. In order to be an entrepreneur, people need to be constantly creative in business. It’s necessary to always reinvent, creating new solutions and being on top of everything, seeing and predicting scenarios.

In order to help companies to solve problems in creative ways, UX professionals use Design Thinking Tools as a form of solving problems, developing products and projects based on the designer’s knowledge. Utilizing research, brainstorms, idea selection, and prototyping to get to an effective solution. This approach stimulates the problem resolution through new perspectives, finding solutions and having answers placing the customers as the center of the decisions and including them throughout the process, since the understanding all the way to the solution delivery.

Normally, techniques are applied in a co-creative workshop, where a previous selection of participants is made with the company, thinking on the personalities, different skills and competent areas that want to participate, in order to have different opinions and visions of the company that will help in the process.

Each workshop is prepared specially in a personalized way, in order to conduct research for better results to a specific problem. Always based on previous researches about the company, its products, competitors and many other subjects that are important and necessary to be worked during the workshop.

As a good practice, the beginning of this dynamic is made as an icebreaker to loosen up and to get to know the people that are participating. The different types of intelligence and learning techniques help directly when it comes to conducting the process and understanding the different ways of working with each person, using various techniques and support tools in this co-creation process.

The conduction of a co-creative workshop based on Design Thinking methodologies with the help of tools that foment creativity has helped people and teams to create a variety of relevant ideas, both in the collaboration of a new concept as well as in the stage of making these ideas tangible, so they can be ready for the market.

The use of Design Thinking as a structured way to combine imagination, knowledge, and experiences in the creation of innovative ideas has effective results for the market. It’s possible to see success in different ways:

• Incremental and radical improvements in the development of new products, processes or services;
• Improvements in the quality of communication and business effectiveness;
• Improvements to recurrent problems that are often present on customer support centers;
• Improvements on the experience of products as a whole, from the launching to the management of it.

Both techniques have helped a variety of sectors such as industries, financial markets, commerce, governments, education, entertainment, among others. Have you identified yourself with a specific topic? It’s a great moment to listen and apply the tips and tricks of a UX professional.

Written by Débora Costa, UX/UI Designer at ilegra