What is innovation? What is not innovation?
So, I don’t want to start this blog on a downer, but in our beloved technology ecosystem there is complete overuse with the term ‘innovation’. Anything ‘cool’ or shiny is dubbed as ‘innovation’. However, the ugliest invention could also be the most innovative one that exists.
Ok so if innovation is a term that is misused, how should it be used? What is innovation? One simple definition I’ve heard that is on point — the process of change with measurable value. It’s moving from A to B successfully and knowing the B is a better place to be. This is definitely oversimplified but if unpack how to achieve this it will make more sense. By now most people have heard the term Design Thinking and it’s claims that it can enable innovation, in my experience this is true if you dive into the belly of the beast and apply it the way it should be applied, so for the rest of this blog I’ll unpack the Design Thinking framework of innovation, please forgive my lo-fi diagrams.
Desirability, Feasibility, Viability.
The Desirability, Feasibility, Viability framework is an excellent way to find innovation, and innovation is where the three overlap. Ok, hold on Dawid, slow down… sure. Desirability — something someone wants, Feasibility — something we can do, Viability — something that makes business sense.
There will be tons of things that we want to do, you remember your economics days at university… scarcity, unlimited wants limited means etc (I passed… just). We want things, our customers want things, our customers customers want things, but we can’t, and shouldn’t do all of it. But still, Desirability is a great place to start. Always start with a person, and desirability. Which person are you designing for? Then dive deep into that. Take a guess who the best person is to tell you about what they want? They are! If you are dealing with stakeholders who say “What they’re looking for is…”, pause and politely ask to speak with “they”. Speak with lots of them.
Ok great, so now you’ve a whole lots of great things that people want, tons of great ideas, it’s almost hilarious how unrealistic some of them are, but hey, that’s ok, by exploring we found a ton of places we may not have known before. So next we want to rank these desires and ideas in terms of impact, there are no rules here about the ranking. Sure some ideas may yield millions of dollars, but how does that stack up with an idea that will stop an accident at work? But do force rank them, there are no ties, which ideas will have the biggest impact. Stop! Don’t think about how hard they are to do yet! Pretend you have unlimited resources. Rank their impact.
Feasibility
So what next? What can we do… Feasibility. This is where we look at all of our resources… money, people, energy. Just like desirability, we give ourselves permission to explore uninhibited for a while. Maybe there are creative partnerships we can look at? Maybe there’s a bit of code we can reuse, maybe there’s an old storage room that we can turn into a hipster cafe? Maybe there are more options than we thought… probably more.
So now we overlap desirability and feasibility… Which ideas will have the most impact and which ones could we actually do. Sure we want to have a pet daycare at work, but given we don’t even have a child daycare, maybe this one is going to be really hard to get across the line. What we find when we do this is there are clear relationships of things we should consider doing and things you should not. There are quick wins, low hanging fruit, synergies (boom, three consulting phrases in succession). There are also things we shouldn’t do, things that are hard, and less important, let’s park these and get back to them later (we won’t get back to them later).
Viability
And finally, viability. Our old friend, the shareholder. Sure we may have the resources and the impact will be huge to turn all our desks into interactive surface hub touch screens, but you know what, it’s going to cost a lot of money, and we’re probably not going to be able to sustain it long term, and we won’t see any measurable return to the company. It needs to make commercial sense, it needs a business model, it needs, ideally, to have a financial benefit. It’s ok if it doesn’t have a financial benefit if we have a strong answer to what the other benefits are.
Intersections
When you intersect desirability, feasibility and viability you have something that people want, you have something that we can do, you have have something we should do.
These are the innovation tests. A chatbot isn’t innovation, AI isn’t innovation, but… a chatbot that helps tourists communicate with city services in their native language without requiring translators for the city IS innovation.
One final piece of advice, focus on one bubble at a time, one intersection point at a time. As marvellous as our brains are we struggle to do 2 things at once beyond walking and breathing. When you’re looking at desirability, only do that, don’t jump to conclusions yet. Then move onto the next components.
This is a fun process, makes sense, and works!
Dawid
