The world of “innovation” is one filled with jargon, fads, and with people waving their arms around on conference podiums.
So – how might you devise a successful innovation programme, without wasting weeks and months at conferences watching arm-wavers?
Give me the ingredients in PLAIN ENGLISH please!
In some recent consultancy work, I was asked to put together a succinct list of properties that any good innovation programme has.
Thinking back through my work with BBC News Labs, both in the lab and at events, and with other engineering & technology organisations, I distilled the required elements of a successful innovation programme down to five.
Five Characteristics to build an Innovation Programme
- Focused – articulate the challenge using the “How might we … ?” question template.
- Regular – regular, recurring, ringfenced time.
- Open – the challenge is open and unrestricted, and importantly has no implementation details inserted.
- Safe – the participants really do honestly feel safe to take risks and try anything they want.
- Tangible – the outputs must be working prototypes (NOT just pictures or people waving their arms)
…which makes a nice acronym FROST – the most chilled innovation framework.
The FROST slide:
More about this soon.