I recently ran a series of innovation workshops at a major German IT company. The goals were to (1) raise the knowledge of innovation and innovation tools, while (2) at the same time developing ideas for innovations.
The project consisted of 3 major steps:
First senior management defined areas within which the organization should innovate. In a 2 day workshop we had a look at different types of innovation using the innovation map, what innovation could mean to the organization, and we developed an innovation roadmap. Senior management chose 4 areas to focus innovation efforts: (1) Products and markets, (2) Collaboration with the customer, (3) Future workplace, and (4) Effectiveness of the business, which was mostly about management innovations.
4 Innovation Techniques
Next was a series of 1,5 day innovation workshops with a total of about 200 employees from different areas within the company. The first half day was spent on getting people into an innovation mood, by discussing what innovation is, talking about innovation myths, and testing different innovation techniques, with a focus on 4 particular ones: (1) Changing perspectives with De Bono’s 6 thinking hats and Freak-consulting, two methodologies helping to challenge existing mental models and address problems from completely new and different angles. (2) Working with analogies for describing the problem in another way, solving it and translating the solution back to the actual problem, (3) Getting inspiration from other disciplines, which was build a lot on The Medici Effect, and (4) Tetralemmas, a technique for resolving paradoxes from 4 perspectives.
On the second day, people formed 4 small groups, each of which worked within one of the 4 innovation areas using one of the 4 techniques. The results were always documented on a diamond in a very visual way, which was afterwards produced and put into the entrance of the office building. All workshops resulted in a total of 40 ideas.
The final step was another 2 day workshop with senior management and 1 participant from each employee workshop who presented the ideas from their workshop. Management decided on which ideas to further pursue, and who will be in charge of implementation.
Comments on this entry are closed.