6 Keys to Innovating with Speed
What do we need to innovate quickly?
You can be a start-up or a business with a smart group of people who have assembled all the key roles, but that does not mean you will innovate quickly. There are key elements that need to be in place for the team to perform and go from discovering insights to creating a breakthrough solution.
1. Keep the team small
In the age of mass specialization and over education is easy to move towards assembling a large team of experts to have all the knowledge needed at your fingertips, but for agility and speed is important to keep the core team small. This will be an ongoing struggle as the team gains momentum and you realize you ‘need’ expertise in other areas, but each core team member should be essential to executing the project at hand.
What do I mean by core team? The crew of decision makers needed to move from idea to execution quickly. These decision makers are the ones responsible for acting through the ambiguity of the project. The ones whose tasks are not clearly defined and activities vary greatly. Keeping the team small helps everyone stay “on the same page” as the group changes direction.
If the team needs specialized talent for clearly defined tasks, you can outsource the work to contractors and even use platforms like oDesk and Elance to find specialized workers. If the tasks are not clearly defined, do your best to keep those decisions within the core team and reach out for advice as needed.
2. Keep the team close to each other
If the concept is not yet clearly defined, make sure the team is located physically close to one another and works out of the same space. Concepts are usually not clearly defined on innovation projects where the team is developing a ‘new to the world’ solution without a proven model to emulate. Example: In creating an ‘online marketplace for music’, iTunes has provided a clear model for success. However, in creating a service for people to make daily trips to the moon, no model yet exists.
If the concept is clearly defined but the tasks to implement are unclear and require judgement, then the team should also be located close to one another. Placing a team close together allows for ‘spontaneous’ and ‘robust’ communication. Up to 93% of communication is non-verbal, hence allowing for team members to be close to one another enables this unstructured non-verbal communication to take place as needed between team members.
A virtual solution that helps when team members are in separate physical locations is a ‘worm hole’ which is an ‘always on’ video conference between offices to allow for spontaneous collaboration. Ideally, the team should be in person, but if not, continuous video projection is the next best thing.
I made the critical mistake of assembling a virtual team early on while starting a non-profit organization. The concept we were developing was not clearly defined and explaining its evolution to other decision makers as we got user feedback, was painful. In every conversation, we had to backtrack to explain the changes and related sequence of events. In the end, we ended up going separate ways as the virtual and user testing team members wanted to take the organization in different directions.
Lesson to be learned: The more undefined the concept, the greater the ambiguity. The greater the ambiguity, the more spontaneous, frequent, and robust communication is needed.
3. Give teams and team members autonomy
For teams to move quickly, members and the group as a whole needs to be empowered to make decisions. For start-ups, this means people have clear roles and responsibilities and can ‘make a call’ when the entire group does not agree.
In for-profit start-ups, this is usually easy as people default to the CEO. The vital mistake some start-ups make early on is not defining the CEO. I was in a start-up that made the mistake of not defining a CEO. It was painful and obtrusive when our advisors finally pushed us to make the call. Do it yourselves early on.
For non-profits or social enterprises, the natural inclination of first timers is to equate ‘social’ with ‘nice’ and ‘collaborative’ and focus on building ‘consensus’. ‘Achieving consensus’ or ‘not achieving consensus’ can become the default decision of the group, which is dangerous. It slows down the team and takes away the one advantage the group has, that it can move quickly.
In both for-profit and non-profits, roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined. Those responsible for the outcome should be empowered to make decisions related to their tasks without consent from the group. If time allows, it is valuable for everyone to ask questions and provide feedback, but when there is no ‘consensus,’ either the individual team member or the leader, needs to make a call. Operating this way empowers every individual in the group to take ownership, make choices, and lead.
4. Place yourself close to the user
When a concept is not well defined, assuming you have a clear problem statement and customer, you should place the team close to the users. In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of an innovation team having a founder that is or was the intended customer. The user (or former user) carries key insights from their experience and understands the nuances of the user experience. Former users can best help the team make tweaks when a proposed solution is not working.
Ideally you have one within your team, but even then, placing yourself closer to the user improves communication, shortens the feedback cycle, and helps you improve quickly, increasing your chance of success.
5. Iterate quickly and often
You want to succeed? Just remember one saying:
Doing is the best typing of thinking
-Tom Chi, Former Google [X], Google Glass
As your small, nimble team hustles to create a working solution to solve your user’s problem, you need to push to ‘do’. What does ‘do’ mean? You need to iteratively ‘simulate the user experience’, or prototype.
When you are striving to create a future that has not been defined, the team needs to repeatedly try new things to learn and discover what works.
As Tom Chi puts it in his TED talk and slideshare, you want to ‘maximize the rate of learning by minimizing the time to try things. Coming from traditional education systems where analysis is stressed and failure is not embraced, we default to planning and analyzing to make sure one solution is perfect, when what we really need to do is test the crudest example of it to understand what works and what does not. This is the basic premise behind the Lean Start-Up’s methodology of releasing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and continuously testing.
What should you be testing? Using popular frameworks from the IDEO and Doblin, you should test the desirability, feasibility, and viability of your concept to help it evolve.
Desirable — What do people desire?
Feasible — What is technically and organizationally feasible?
Viable — What is financially viable?
Developing solutions to test what is desirable, feasible, and viable helps the team develop a working solution. Experimenting iteratively, as IIT and Doblin share in their design thinking framework, increases the chances of success over time.
Innovation is not a straight forward process, but assembling a small team with the right skills, the autonomy to act, and situated close to the user; a team that learns and evolves by iterating quickly…and you have a recipe for innovating at the speed of light.
6. BUILD, SELL, LEARN, REPEAT
While you are ‘iterating’ or continuously building and improving your product, you should be selling. That, right..selling. Gone are the days when you could keep building and amassing users without a clear path to profitability. Now, having clear idea of the business plan that is going to work and evidence that it will work (aka paying customers, even if its a small number) are table stakes.
Selling improves the feedback and learning cycle. I a few months ago I launched a Kickstarter project for KORK, an ecofriendly cork wallet. Customers asked during the project for different colors, about what happened when I put it in the wash, and if it floated, among other things. I was able to receive that feedback, react, iterate on the product, and inform users. Priceless. That would not have possible if I was not selling.
Written by Sergio Marrero
Edited by Jazmin Cabeza
