Collaborative innovation canvas tool

1. Collaborative Innovation
Canvas

3. Component
• The Canvas is made up of 8 components, each representing a core
aspect of the collaborative innovation world. These components are
grouped under 3 fundamental driving forces: Alignment, People, and
Process. Everything that matters to your program will find a home on
this Canvas. Let's go through the components to understand what
they represent.

4. Strategy
• This is where you start. What do you wish to achieve with an
innovation platform? What does success look like for you in the short,
medium, and long term? Use this box to provide focus, narrow in on
the strategic areas of interest for your business.
• DHL knows exactly what their strategy is: use the tool to enable every
employee to submit cost reducing and process improvement ideas
which can immediately impact the bottom line. Then give those
ideators a share of the rewards when ideas are implemented. It's a
giant system which plugs into every area of the business, no
employee left behind.

5. Resources
• These are the resources you have access to, or can provide, to drive
your program forward. It includes the core innovation team members,
the tools and methods you will provide your audience, and any
particular innovation budgets available to you.
• Airbus has a centralized innovation team, which acts like a utility to
the rest of the business. They provide four key resources to facilitate
company-wide collaborative innovation: 1) the online community
space (the innovation platform); 2) a specifically designed process
which everybody follows; 3) M&T - additional methods, and
additional tools, to help develop ideas; 4) physical spaces to run
workshops and foster innovation techniques such as design thinking.

6. Stakeholders
• An ideation platform will not gain on-going traction with end-user adoption
alone, it must have support from top management. These stakeholders will
need to be managed - bringing them on board means delivering results
which help them succeed. Here you need to define your stakeholders, what
influences them, and understand how to manage them. You also need to
consider the innovation advocates - these champions will be critical to your
success.
• A French Manufacturing company knew the importance senior
stakeholders could have on the audience’s participation. By bringing them
online to the launch challenge, providing comments to ideas, participation
shot up dramatically, ending up with 1,300 ideas posted, and over 3,000
comments.

7. Audience
• Here you define who the target audience is for your platform: all
employees; specific business units; customers; partners; academia; the
general public. If you understand your audience well, then you will also
want to think about cultural groups that lay within it, such as the skeptics,
and decide how best to handle them – for many this may mean whole
departments such as IT, HR or Legal
• Mattel runs an exclusive innovation community for external inventors.
Previously these individuals would submit their ideas on paper, and a slow
process would begin to filter, review, and provide feedback. The online
program enables inventors to privately submit their designs, and have an
instant conversation with Mattel about their concepts.

8. Communications
• To get the attention of your audience, you have to think like a marketer. Setting
out a communications plan well in advance of your program launch is highly
advisable. Think about how to make it interesting, how to communicate the value
of having everybody involved in innovation. Can you launch it virally? Who are
the key hubs in the organization to help spread the word? What materials do you
need to produce: posters, flyers, fun gifts? A consumer products company we
work with sent out little boxes to 500 lead users - in the box was a mini-Einstein
desk figure, with instructions on how to log-in and use the platform.
• A comprehensive marketing campaign can signal to the audience that the
initiative is serious. A German-based engineering company enlisted the help of an
external design agency, who helped to build a communication strategy. The four
pillars of their strategy were: Recognition (how people will instantly recognize the
initiative); Awareness (activities to raise the profile); Understanding (education
materials and activities to build support); Management (marketing specifically to
senior leaders to gain their attention and support). The result was widespread
adoption across the entire company on the very first idea challenge.

9. Decision Making
• How will you evaluate ideas? Do you have one method, or many? Who are
the reviewers, and do they need to be educated and aligned? Do you
expect high volume on some campaigns, and if so, how do you plan to
handle it? There are many features available in the tool to support decision
making, you’ll want to select the ones which work best for you – and
possibly provide offline reviewing options for some particular scenarios.
• Consistency on how ideas are reviewed can be important for your
audience, and it can also make it easier to measure value across different
business units and challenges. Swisslog, for example, uses the IDEO
method for all ideas: Viability (business); Feasibility (technical); and
Desirability (human). The review team is educated in the IDEO design
thinking methodology, so they can apply the thinking to the process.

10. Execution
• The other side of innovation is all about execution - turning those fragments of ideas into
revenue generation. Do you have funding in place for those promising ideas? Do you
have a process to handle different types of ideas: a fast track to implementation for small
cost saving ideas, and more in-depth elaboration cycles for more complex breakthrough
innovations? Do you have a methodology ready to assess and build out these ideas –
such as the lean startup’s build, measure, learn? It’s unlikely that submitted ideas are
already fully formed and ready to be implemented – rather Ideas need a path through
the organization to allow them to grow and thrive.
• A global telecommunications company has a mature process in place for taking ideas
through to implementation, which includes the adoption of 22 different methodologies
to support innovation execution. In a two year timeframe 50,000 users worldwide have
participated, producing over 12,000 ideas. 300 sub-funnel experts have been identified
to support idea development, resulting in an average of 20% implementation rates on
campaigns. This focus on successful campaign follow-up has helped to achieve their
highest ever internal innovation culture index score - an annual survey to measure how
innovative employees see the company, and how supportive it is to their ideas. It has
also produced over €2 billion in new product development revenue.

11. Measurements
• Many collaborative innovation programs fail within two years of their
launch. The reason is often linked to one or more of the areas on this
canvas not being fully developed. One crucial piece that is lacking is the
ability to define, and fulfill, the key performance indicators which matter.
How do you know what success looks like? The answer will change as your
program grows in maturity, and your KPI’s need to reflect that, as do your
communication to stakeholders and the audience.
•
• WorleyParsons, a large engineering services company in the oil and gas
industry, has a sophisticated measuring system for program output. They
seek to find cost savings and process improvements for their customers,
taking ideas from both the WorleyParsons 35,000+ employee base, and
their customer base. The result is a detailed analysis of which divisions, and
which regions, are generating the most value for their customers. Results
are aggregated to top management, showing the monthly value the
innovation program is bringing.

12. Alignment. People. Process.
The three core sections of the Collaborative Innovation Canvas are the fundamentals to
any innovation initiative:
• Alignment of the activities to the core business goals and needs. Without which an
initiative will likely starve and die. Creating tight alignment means you are in step with
the company direction, and can find ways to support that through innovation. It’s the
fastest way to build acceptance and momentum, while retaining an innovative edge.
• People are central to any innovation activity - you need the diversity and creativity to
generate novel ideas; and you need the discipline and know-how to see them
implemented. Building a culture which can flex between both worlds is the Holy Grail.
• You want innovation to be a part of everybody's job. To do that you need processes –
these can turn your fringe innovation program into a repeatable, and fully adopted,
business activity.