SUMMARY

This is the fourth episode in our Spotlight Series – let’s get into how to come up with innovative ideas and how to validate them. Where do you look for ideas? Who is in the room to validate them? And we reveal our best practices for running an innovation workshop.

Connect with Ask an InnovatorHave a question you want answered on a future episode? Heck yes! Email us!Are you interested in an innovation workshop or just asking some questions about how to run one? Get after it!

Full Transcript

Erin Srebinski [00:13]: How do I collect innovative ideas on projects?

Josh Barker [00:16]: So this is a very interesting one because I think a lot of organizations, if they’re large, they have someplace to say, “Hey, here’s a place to submit new ideas. And so that backlog can be a good thing. It can also be a bad thing. It’s a good thing if you do it well and you can communicate. The biggest problem is communication back to the people that are submitting the ideas. You need to be careful with how you do this. Oftentimes if people don’t hear communication back – they will stop trusting the process because they’ll think it’s just going into the ether, right? And that their ideas don’t matter. Or if their idea isn’t chosen, they’re going to think that, I’m just not smart enough to think about innovation.

I think it needs to be some kind of submission process with a lot of communication backward. One way to collect innovative ideas, is really they have to have an innovation team or an innovation champion or set of champions. People that really have been trained in how to facilitate innovation workshops. So innovation workshops are a great place where you can invite people from different departments and generate cross-departmental ideas. Different people should be involved in each of these sessions. This gives everyone an opportunity to really generate new ideas for their particular department that might help them.

Then once those ideas have been generated you can have a prototyping workshop. And so that workshop could even help prototype rapidly some of those ideas. Taking them, if they’re digital ideas, even a step further with our prototyping team and prototyping those out. So that’s really how you can involve everyone is these workshops. They’ll feel like they’re a part of it. Because the idea is that you also want to create an innovative culture. It’s not just a submission form where they’re submitting their ideas and it’s going to the ether and they don’t feel like their ideas matter are valued.

These workshops help generate a lot of excitement. Right? And they help generate, “Hey, there’s actually something that could happen that could bring it to another step.” And there’s collaboration. There are a bunch of people working together rather than just these independent forms being submitted.

ES [02:30]: A lot of companies may ask, we have a ton of people, we have a ton of ideas in our organization. They all come in from different places. How do we evaluate these innovation ideas? How do we pick the right ones?

JB [02:40]: So really, I think this is a loaded question because I could probably talk for a good half hour or hour on just this subject alone.