Innovation Workshop Activities

It doesn’t matter where you work and what your job role is, if you work with other people together as a team, you will always encounter the same challenges:

• Unclear goals and miscommunication that cause busy work and overtime
• Unstructured meetings that leave attendants tired, confused and without clear outcomes.
• Frustration builds up because internal challenges to productivity are not addressed
• Sudden changes in priorities lead to a loss of focus and momentum
• Muddled compromise takes the place of clear decision- making, leaving everybody to come up with their own interpretation.
• In short, a lack of structure leads to a waste of time and effort, projects that drag on for too long and frustrated, burnt out teams.
  

This tool helps small and large groups to identify key transformative trends over the next few years, explore their consequences, and begin to look at how they can be met to create business opportunities. By the end of the workshop, participants create a list of most relevant trends; and an elaboration on three most-important trends, including ideas around how their organization/s could act to meet those trends. Can be run both online and face-to-face.

Teams need to explore, test and try new things to innovate. Early efforts will be improved and progress when feedback is given and received. Feedback is a key part of any project development and crucial to the iterative process.

It's important to have a learning/growth mindset to see new possibilities and a framework in place to provide boundaries and a safe container for both the receiver and the giver of the feedback at hand.

A process such as I Like, I Wish, I Wonder can support teams (big and small) to collect feedback quickly. Can be run online or face-to-face. A Miro template is attached below.

You can enable participants to find novel approaches to challenges by immersing themselves in the activities of the people with local experience—often their colleagues on the front line or anyone who uses their product or service. You open the door to change and innovation by helping participants explore what people actually do and feel in creating, delivering, or using their offering. Their observations and experience can spur rapid performance improvements and expedite prototype development. The combined observations may make it easy to spot important patterns.

1. Review key information
2. Start design work on paper, 
3. Consider multiple variations,
4. Create a detailed solution.

This is a fantastic depiction of modern product and service development, and it allows a team and a leader to communicate effectively in which phase of the innovation journey are they. It helps the team to focus and to checklist the events, tools, and profiles that can generate the most growth on each phase.

In the Design Sprint process, the interview is a crucial step to test your prototype.

This method provides a deliberate and scientific approach to conduct effective interviews. A consistent process and unbiased mindset yield realistic feedback. Effective scoring gives clarity to the results and primes you to make strategic decisions.

This is an exercise to inspire your team with products or services that they think they can use as inspiration for their concepts in the next phases of their design sprints.

World Café is a simple yet powerful method, originated by Juanita Brown, for enabling meaningful conversations driven completely by participants and the topics that are relevant and important to them. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and provide simple guidelines. Participants then self-organize and explore a set of relevant topics or questions for conversation.

Ideation and Concept Development is a process for groups to work creatively and collaboratively to generate creative ideas. It’s a general approach that can be adapted and customized to suit many different scenarios. It includes basic principles for idea generation and several steps for groups to work with. It also includes steps for idea selection and development.

This is a practical, dynamic and versatile method for groups to explore ideas and questions together. Something like a physical questionnaire; participants respond to questions by walking around the space and placing themselves on an imaginary line. This provides a starting point for reflection and discussion and brings teams together.

Client-centricity” (or “client-focus”) is an approach to business based on putting the client/customer at the center of an organization's philosophy, strategy, and operations. This exercise promotes collaborative exploration and reflection around an organization’s approach to its clients. Participants discuss and share positive experiences they have had as clients, and use this to define their approach to “client-centricity” as a group. They discuss different groups of clients based on needs, and explore how successfully the organization has met those needs in the past. The exercise ends with a prioritization of areas for improvement.