How to Build an Innovation Process: Part 2
5 Key Steps to a Successful Innovation Process Mapping Workshop
When developing an innovation process for your company, some things to keep in mind are: customize the process to your business, make sure it is easy to follow and use, clearly define roles & hand-offs, and make it repeatable. Also, one of the key components to a successful innovation process is to ensure you have input, alignment, and ownership from a cross-functional team on the development. An Innovation Process Mapping Workshop can help develop a customized innovation process, get buy-in from across the organization, and remove any roadblocks early-on to give you the best chance of success in implementing your company’s innovation process.
The following are 5 key steps to create your company’s innovation process:
Step 1: Identify the cross functional team
Be sure that your workshop includes all of the teams that touch the process – product management, marketing, sales, customer service, engineering, etc. You will also want to include people from all levels of the organization.
Step 2: Create Agenda for workshop
Create an agenda that allows for plenty of group interaction and creativity, with breaks as needed. We like to use tailored games to make the workshops effective but still fun. A typical workshop spans 1-2 days.
Step 3: Develop prep materials for the workshop to get everyone on the same page for the day
This could include glossaries, background on company, innovation mission and goals, as well as all of the items needed for the workshop and any games.
Step 4: Create communications and invitation for cross functional team
How you position the workshop is important. A 1-2 day workshop is a big investment of time for people. Be sure to let them know why it is important that they participate, what they can expect from the workshop and how it will benefit the organization as well as them personally.
Step 5: Facilitate cross functional workshop to map out the idea to launch process
Keep participants engaged by facilitating a workshop that is fun, interesting, productive, and on point.
From your Innovation Process Mapping Workshop you should look to create:
- Documentation from the workshop including: process flows, issues / challenges list, and planning impacts including impacts to resources, tools, systems, etc…
- Communicate process to the rest of the organization so that new ideas are developed and launched effectively, efficiently and in a consistent manner
- Documented list of tools, templates, and systems that are identified in the workshop to support the innovation process
- Training program and workbook that makes it easy to get the organization up to speed on the new innovation process
Be sure to check out How to Build an Innovation Process: Part 1
Karie Starrett
karie@clearworks.net
