Innovation is the result of much more than just an aha moment. Let's take some time to talk about the innovation process and the approaches you might take to support innovators along the way. My name is David Touve and I'm the director of the i.Lab here at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. We work with innovators every day of the week. Real and truly disruptive innovation requires hard work with uncertain outcomes along the way. And so, the use of frameworks and guiding principles can help support innovators along this uncertain path. Furthermore, since any innovation will be used by someone or something in some way, the needs and wants and motivations of that end user, to someone or something that benefits from the product or service becomes paramount to the impact of an opportunity for that innovation. When any new product idea hits the sorts of buttons that suggest a dramatic innovation, something we have not experienced before, our ability to gather reliable feedback on that impact and usefulness decreases significantly without being able to place the product in someone's hands or provide the service in person. Given these three challenges we have the i.Lab like many innovation labs focus at the very least upon three core capabilities when supporting innovators and the challenges inherent to innovation. First, structuring the innovation process to combine the benefits of creativity, curiosity, ingenuity, science and even chance. Second, understanding the end user, their challenges, needs and wants alongside the resulting impacts of any innovation. Third, engaging these end users and other potential stakeholders as directly as possible with some version of the product or service, however basic that version may be to get tangible feedback along the way. Given the innovation process requires hard work with uncertain outcomes far beyond an aha moment. There is good reason to provide innovators with not only underlying frames and principles to structure the process, but also milestones to support that process. Design thinking is one of those frames. At its highest level and as described by Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, Design thinking as a human-centered approach drawing from the toolkit of designers to connect the complex dynamics as people, technology and commerce, or simply life. This iterative and organic process while perhaps the norm among experienced designers can stand in stark contrast to the more linear institutional process adopted and even expected for corporate planning, in that corporate context, simply shifting people to this design-oriented frame can offer clear advantages. General principles such as persona's, jobs to be done, or effectuation also help to structure the innovation challenge. The former two principles, persona's and jobs to be done, focus upon the experiences of underlying motivations for an outcomes desired from a new product or service. As a result of this user centered priority, any hopeful innovator is forced to take a few steps back from a unitary focus upon the technical details or business context of the product or service. Ultimately, the purpose of this exercise is to help people do what they need to do. The latter set of principles those of effectuation, which we will not be able to describe in great detail here, play a helpful and dynamic role as any innovation begins to interact not only with end users but also with other actors in the market context. Central to the effectual approach is the inclusion of a wider set of stakeholders in the development process, reducing the overall risk by way of this inclusion while also creating a network of connections through which a product or service might be further refined and introduced to the market. Effectuation can be thought of as simply heading in a rather general direction with what you know what you have and who you know at the ready, then permitting this network of connections, knowledge and resources to guide the process far more directly than your initial hunch or intent. It's cooking with what you have in the cupboards rather than deciding upon a meal and a recipe only to find out you don't have what you need. Alongside these frames and principles the infusion of milestones along the way can help innovators convert what seems like a daunting undoable challenge into a series of doable tasks, deliverable and measurable outputs and even deniable tests. Why deniable tests, because it's a myth. The talented designers or gurus with the indwelled and in infallible capacity to intuit what people really want. Ultimately, any new product or service idea is a hypothesis, a hunch that assumes something about how the world works or what the world wants. Introducing milestones along the way forces hopeful innovators to identify and define their hypotheses and to test those hypotheses leading to confirmation or denial of the initial assumptions. As a result of this hypothesis driven approach to milestones, innovators can fail quickly limiting committed resources to only those required to test the next assumption. Failure in this context is far more affordable and even convertible to new and better informed ideas. Perhaps the secret sauce to approach such as design thinking of the ways in which these frames weave both understanding and engaging potential end users into an intertwined and iterative process. Human-centered approaches placed extremely high value upon empathy rather than sympathy for the impacted users. A concern that can translate to a clearly defined real problem with a root cause worth the commitment of time and uncertainty that will be required to develop a compelling solution. However, rather than convert this empathy to an immediate conclusion and a single solution, the next step in this process requires the ideation of multiple different solutions followed by capturing general insights from potential users on all of these perspective solutions. Essentially for any invention to truly address a real problem or opportunity, that invention needs to match the various dimensions of the experience, need or opportunity as closely as possible. While guessing the right dimensions can be a successful tactic, guessing is also an approach that is likely to fail far more often than it succeeds. And so the development of a range of early guesses provides a convenient hack. Only one of a great many of these ideas needs to be headed in the right direction, we just don't know which one. We increase our chances of discovering this one by creating and getting feedback on a wide range of ideas. This feedback is then taken into account toward the development of an initial prototype perhaps a very low infidelity. The purpose of this early prototype is to gather even more direct and realistic feedback from potential users. Low fidelity prototypes are simply those that can be built quickly and with a limited set of features and quality. Perhaps even more limited than what seems like amenable viable product focused as clearly as possible upon a single problem to be addressed. The emphasis of this part of the process being interactions with and inclusion of end users not the production of the coolest prototype ever imagined or some endeavor to address all of the user's needs. The sequence of prototype and feedback then passes through a series of iterations, each stop along the way further refining the innovation in waiting before any final product decision is made. As a result, the challenge of understanding the end user is intertwined with the effort to engage that end user in the early and ongoing stages through which the product or service is being developed. Failure in this context is ironically an absolutely necessary part of the process. Each no, the supposed failure sends an innovator in search of a yes and each yes leads to a deeper refinement of the overall idea. Hopefully that was a helpful, albeit brief introduction to the innovation process. How we might structure the process, understand the end user and engage them. These are the approaches we take at the i.Lab to support innovators through the process.
