Innovation is such a BS term. Here’s how we’re building a business around it.
‘Innovation’ is one of the most abused buzzwords in business and technology these days. The term’s broad use has led to a misunderstanding of its meaning. A quick Google search will return various definitions of the word: some focus on invention, some on creativity, and some on optimization.
A great example of a misconception of innovation would be an early attempt to create a digital car lock. Historically, we used to unlock our cars by:
- Walking up to the car
- Taking out the key
- Physically unlocking the car door
At some point, a major car manufacturer decided to disrupt the process and solve it digitally via an app. The process then evolved to:
- Walking up to the car
- Pulling a smartphone out
- Waking up the phone
- Unlocking the phone
- Exiting the last opened app
- Exiting the last opened group of apps
- Swiping through a sea of icons, searching for the app
- Tapping the app icon
- Waiting for the app to load
- Finding the Unlock action
- Tapping the Unlock button or sliding a slider to unlock
- Physically opening the car door.
How exactly was this an innovation? How did it offer a better alternative to the existant process?
A definition we particularly appreciate at No BS is the one proposed by Joe Dwyer:
“Innovation is the process of creating value by applying novel solutions to meaningful problems.”
This definition makes innovation actionable by basing it on three major factors:
- If it doesn’t create value, it’s simply an invention.
- If it’s not new, it’s just an optimization of what already exists.
- If it doesn’t solve a meaningful problem, then it’s art.
This definition also stresses the conception of innovation as a process. It’s not a hit-or-miss, but rather an iterative path that leads to tangible results.
This iterative approach to innovation promotes the value of execution over ideas. How many times have you found yourself thinking or saying, “I had this idea before they built it”?
Ideas are a dime a dozen, so it is the execution that truly matters. While great ideas executed poorly have no value, good ideas executed well could be extremely valuable.
However, smart execution must still follow a worthy idea. It is no longer enough to have a “good quality” product or service — you need to have the right one. Therefore, the focus should be on building the right idea. You could have a great team building a product, but how do you make sure you’re executing the right idea?
The way we see it at No BS, fostering innovation requires:
- Research: to truly understand the challenge at hand, the shortcomings of existing solutions, and the needs, motivations, and behaviour of your customers;
- Co-creation: to make sure all relevant stakeholders and departments in your team share their expertise and contribute their best ideas;
- Execution: by spending time doing smart work rather than busy work. Your focus should be on achieving results rather than first perfecting the solution;
- Rapid validation: to get market and customer feedback on your solution as soon as possible;
- Iteration: to respond to your customers’ feedback by adjusting your solution accordingly.
For all of the above reasons, we have adopted the Design Sprint as an effective process to kickstart and foster innovation within companies. A Design Sprint is the fastest way to find out if a product is worth developing, if a feature is worth the effort, or if a value proposition is really valid.
Created at Google Ventures, the Design Sprint is a 4-day Design Thinking process for rapidly solving business challenges, creating new products and services, or improving existing ones.
Simply put, it compresses months of work and money into a few days.
In a perfect world, to test the validity of an idea or solution, a team would build it and launch it in the market. They would then observe the feedback it gets and act on it by iterating on the idea.
However, the Build phase tends to take much longer then expected and needed. This leads to postponements of the solution’s launch, which in turn delays the collection of any feedback. This also results in a lot of wasted time and money.
Enter the Design Sprint, which cuts out the fat by ditching the Build and Launch phases altogether. By building a high-fidelity prototype instead of a full-blown solution, the Design Sprint allows you to get immediate market feedback on your idea without wasting any unneeded time or money.
The Design Sprint consists of 2 client workshop days, in which we define the challenge and ideate a solution together. On day 3, we design and build a high-fidelity prototype of the solution we’ve come up with. On day 4, we test the prototype with 5 of your target customers or users to validate whether or not we’re building the right thing.
After the Design Sprint, we will have uncovered some real customer insights that will guide our next steps and make decisions easier:
- The prototype could get very positive feedback, which would be a great signal to proceed with development. It could also benefit from an iteration sprint to further polish the idea and bring it to production-ready.
- The prototype could get mixed feedback which we could study and act upon for further refinement. A follow-up Sprint would be ideal in this case, by integrating the feedback from the test and re-investigating the challenge.
- The prototype could get negative reviews. While this Sprint may seem like a failure at first, it should actually be celebrated as a win: it would have saved your organization months’ worth of the time and money it would otherwise take to realize that the idea wasn’t worth pursuing.
According to our clients, the value delivered by a Design Sprint is not only a market-validated prototype, but also a change in the mindset of the team. Accordingly, all team members get to realize how fast it is possible to bring new ideas to the market, gain solid alignment on the vision and next steps, and are generally more excited about and invested in the future of the organisation!
No BS is an innovation studio that uses the Design Sprint to help companies solve real challenges, design meaningful products & services, and develop solid UX strategies. We have run Design Sprints for startups and corporations operating in Health Tech, Food Tech, Mobility, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Logistics, Insurance, Mindfulness, Fitness, Local Commerce, and Enterprise Software.
More info on nobsstudio.com!
