ACT//DO//DESIGN&DEFINE
Diagnostic – ideas!
After the presentation, people’s creative ideas should be flowing! It’s time to get them all down. Here are a couple of ideation techniques you could use to capture the ideas.
Brainstorming
You might like to use big sheets of paper and have a scribe who runs round whilst people talk; you might like to get individuals to write ideas onto sticky post-it notes. At this stage, quantity of ideas is important! Then go through them all as a group, clustering ideas. The headings for clustered ideas, or the big sheets of paper might be broad (eg. artistic product, operations, audience development, business models). Questions people should try and answer in relation to the headings are:
- In an ideal, money-is-no-object world, what do you want to achieve? (Refer to your business model audit)
- What, generally do you want to achieve? (Refer to your value proposition audit, and consider those capabilities better digitised)
- Referring to your digital assets audit, what entirely new opportunities are there? (think about products you could produce, but also consider building platforms that allow other companies or customers to build on and innovate new opportunities. For example, you could open up your organisation’s data through selling an API, and watch as other businesses build new services. Your new platform acts as the critical connection point. Watch a case study about Edinburgh Festivals’ API development)
- What are your current digital/IT capacity needs? (Refer to your digital technology and digital proficiency audits.)
- What new, hidden or unsatisfied customer needs might you solve if you developed your capabilities engaging with your customer networks (refer to the digital engagement auditing you did)
- What if…? You had a platform business model, or worked in co-opetition between firms, or worked at disintermediation or intermediation in your field?
- How could digital technologies enhance or facilitate these aims? If you use digital technologies to solve a need, does the solution still fit well with your value proposition and core capabilities?
The Fast Idea Generator
This exercise works well if it is solutions that you need to already recognised problems. The Fast Idea Generator lets you ideate a problem or opportunity from a range of perspectives. Digital technologies make it fast, easy and inexpensive to test ideas, so master the art of rapid experimentation. Rapid and iterative learning is a new approach to innovation.
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Rapid experimentation of the service based ideas can involve convergent experiments. With a valid sample test group, use continuous A/B and multivariate testing, like Amazon and Google use to refine marketing and online services. Other more divergent experiments may use minimum viable prototypes to explore new products.