How to create and choose innovation challenges in the company!
What would happen if corporate challenges were not fully aligned with corporate strategy and objectives? In this article you will learn how to generate challenges that generate value and create a real advantage for the company and its stakeholders.
What would happen if corporate challenges were not fully aligned with corporate strategy and objectives? In this article you will learn how to generate challenges that generate value and create a real advantage for the company and its stakeholders.
Choosing the themes and challenges on which to focus is an extremely critical step in the path of innovation, the real risk is to focus on aspects that are not perfectly aligned, or in some cases, even divergent from the strategy. It is therefore best to follow a process that reasonably assures us of making the right choices and avoid investing time and resources in the wrong direction.
First of all, it is good to distinguish between innovation theme and innovation challenge. A theme represents a generic guideline or a strategic indication to follow, while a challenge deriving from a specific theme consists of an expected problem or benefit that can be addressed and solved, but we will return to this concept in more detail later.
The choice of themes, on which to focus the innovation strategy, belongs to and usually falls within the full competence of the company management or the board. Here are the most important steps and recommendations to follow to choose the themes and create innovation challenges.
In this phase, following the logical path we have identified, it is necessary to generate a series of rough themes on which to focus one's attention, the minimum necessary requirement, as mentioned, is that they are perfectly aligned and consistent with the company's strategy. Although there is no ideal number of themes, the advice is not to exceed and in any case not to exceed ten. The link between strategy and innovation is fundamental and must not be absolutely overlooked. To define the main lines of innovation it is necessary to ask some questions and identify problems or critical issues that can be addressed and resolved through the design and execution of something new in terms of product, service or process. If we feel the need to solve a problem or want to improve something through an unusual path or system of thought, this can represent a valid innovation theme, provided it remains generic and does not contain solutions.
A few examples:
Increase the mobile experience of our customers
Improve the use of training contents by our students
Improve commercial decision-making processes within the company.
Improve delivery times of clinical test results to our patients
Involve our customers in the ideation and creation processes of our products and services
Now is the time to define the challenges related to each innovation theme, of course it is possible that one or more challenges may be linked to an innovation theme. A challenge represents an expected problem or benefit that can be addressed or resolved. Furthermore, a challenge must never contain one or more possible solutions in its description. We want to focus on what "hurts or we want to improve", but without being conditioned by a possible concrete solution.
Generally, the generation and choice of challenges are also a typical task of the company management or the board.
It is very important to describe the challenge precisely:
How could we get ... [expected benefit or denial of the problem]
Let's see an example:
Problem: our customers invest a lot of time in check-in and this generates frustration.
Expected benefit: I would like our customers not to spend a lot of time checking in and this creates frustration.
Challenge: how can we prevent our customers from investing a lot of time at check-in and that this does NOT generate frustration?
Bad challenge (represents a possible solution): how could we be able to implement an automatic registration system in the hotel?
The verbs to be used preferably to define a challenge are:
Facilitate
Increase
Improve
Maximize
Guarantee
Reduce
Minimize
Remove
Some recommendations:
choose challenges aligned to the company's short-term strategy. We want to generate a tangible, measurable and demonstrable impact on the company.
avoid challenges associated with major historical problems of the company. We want to maintain a balance between demonstrating the effectiveness of the model and demonstrating its impact to avoid unnecessary difficulties in this regard.
choose challenges that affect internal and external customers. We want to demonstrate that we can generate positive and significant changes both inside and outside the organization.
focus on challenges that require collaboration between distinct areas of the organization, whether they are already collaborating or not. We want to demonstrate that we can facilitate collaboration and communication with a common language, thus accelerating the generation of successful proposals.
limit and concretize the challenges to the maximum, describing them briefly and concretely.
avoid the challenges that imply proposals that can generate business models that "attack" the company's current business model. Our goal is to complete an innovation project by facilitating the subsequent realization of the proposals defined and tested by reducing resistance to change.
The last activity to do before closing this phase is to associate each series with a series of stakeholders who are directly or interruptedly linked to the challenge, influence it or are influenced by it. This is because all the following phases, analysis, value creation, prototyping and testing are strongly linked and depend on the various stakeholders behaviours and expectations.
The phase of creation of the innovation themes and generation of the associated challenges, in an innovation path, should be completed in maximum 3 half day workshops, over a period of time that does not exceed two weeks. This is essential to give continuity to the process and not to lose the involvement and commitment of the management in such a crucial moment.
Conclusions
With this article you read how:
1) create the themes and strategic guidelines for innovation
2) correctly create and define innovation challenges
3) what are the characteristics of a innovation challenges
