How to innovate in the social space.

1. Innovating in the social space
By Robin Low

2. INTRODUCTION NEW
METHODS, IDEAS OR
PRODUCTS

3. PART 1

4. Innovation
• Innovation does not mean only IT solutions
– Unnecessary tech is simply a waste of money
• Innovation starts from within, corporate
culture needs to support innovation.
• Innovation comes in big and small, there is
change to small.
• When you innovate, change will happen,
change needs to be managed.

5. Barriers to Innovation
FEAR
1) Fear of failing and uncertainty.
– When it has not be done before, there is much
fear that it will not succeed, and often cause
organizational paralysis
2) Fear of looking stupid.
– Many executives don’t like to learn new skills,
egos are at stake and they don’t want to look like
amateurs.

6. Barriers to Innovation
EXPERIENCE
3) Knowledge can be a crutch.
– Knowing too much of a subject may cause
executives not to take in new ideas and reject
facts contrary to their experience.
4) Outdated knowledge.
– Many executives graduated years ago and their
idea of technology is often outdated and they do
not take the time to learn new skills.

7. Your Organization
• Your employees need to know your tagline
and mission statement. Executive should
demonstrate it, and it should be part of
corporate culture.
• Motivation is key for innovation, employees
need to feel ownership and they are
empowered to make a difference

8. Don’t chase perfection
• Creating something revolutionary is never
perfect.
• Don’t wait, there is no perfect time to try and
launch.
• Don’t worry about working on a new process
or product.
• Remember, the first laser printer is crap, but it
is a revolutionary crap.

9. Haters will hate
• There will always be people that will hate any
sort of change, whether it is good or bad.
• All products and services will polarize people.
• Remember, there will also be a subset of
people that will love the product.

10. Communicate well
• For every innovation, you need to sell it. The
leader needs to share the thoughts behind the
innovation and communicate the benefits and
values.
• Use the 10-20-30 rule: create 10 slides for a
20-minute presentation, and use 30-point
font.
• Tailor presentation to audience.

11. Think beyond norms spark innovation
• Use design thinking?
• Combining mundane methods together may
create a new solution.
• In a share economy, don’t think of innovating
alone.

12. PART 2

15. Design thinking

16. Experience of Design Thinking

17. Innovation is tied to empathy
• Empathy is the foundation to Design thinking
as well
• Lived experience of the end user (or
beneficiary) is key.

18. Empathy Fail

19. Empathy
Fail

20. A bad system will defeat a
good person every time
-- Edwards Demming

21. Empathy
What is Empathy?
Empathizing means getting out of the office and
interacting with beneficiaries or end users, living
in their shoes, before you design the programs,
and throughout the process to make sure you
are on the right track.

22. Tools of Empathy
• Interviews
• Observation / immersion
You are not looking for what they think they want
– you are looking for what they need, based on
what they do
• Engaging in the program as an end user
• Free yourself from expectations and
assumptions.
• Do careful recordings.

23. Define
• Define the design challenge, what is the
problem that we are trying to solve?

24. Steps to define
• Collect impression /
images
• Pay attention to
emotions,
motivations and
context
• Post
• Clutter
• Notice Patterns
• Identify themes
• Notice
contradictions
• Discuss
• Draft

25. Evaluate design challenge
Further it
• Broad enough to discover unexpected
value
• Narrow enough to be managable

26. Ideate
• Use various ideation techniques
1. Questioning assumptions
2. Opportunity redefinition
3. Wishing
4. Triggered brainwalking
5. Semantic intuition
6. Picture prompts
7. Worst idea
http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2013/05/30/the-7-all-time-greatest-ideation-techniques/

27. Prototype

28. How to prototype
• Create a MVP (Minimal Viable product)
• This can be a
– Storyboard
– Roleplay
– Rough Model
– 3D printing / laser cutting / making
– Brainstorming
Prototyping is to think, learn and build quickly.

29. Test
• Involve end user or beneficiaries to try the
prototype.
• Pivot
• (Revise if needed)

30. However…
While these key steps have proven that it can deliver
creativity to organization by providing qualitative
value in innovation, it’s strength becomes its
weakness because these steps are insufficient and
unconnected to the reality. Therefore, innovation
cannot happen until and unless there is an equal
input from Business Thinking
http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2013/02/25/why-design-thinking-will-fail/

31. Flaws in design thinking?
• Design consultancies that promoted Design
Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process
trick would produce significant cultural and
organizational change.
• In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted
that mess along with the process and real
innovation took place. In most others, it did not.
• Design thinking assumes that your beneficiaries
CANNOT solve problems on their own, and you
are NEEDED to solve it for them.

32. PART 3

33. Innovation is only made by
motivated people

34. Inducing Innovation
• Working climate must be forgiving and
understanding
• Working environment and hierarchy must
allow mistakes and failures to happen and
learn from them, rather than penalize teams
and employees who make them.

35. Understand
• Innovation can be driven from a true
understanding of the problem or need.
• You need a team with good knowledge of the
beneficiary or customer or users of the
product or service to define and develop
solutions that the innovation concerns.
• Beneficiaries are often capable to come up
with good solutions. Get them involved to
solve their problems, so they OWN the
solution. CROWDSOURCE

37. True Innovation
• True innovation bring value to the receiver
and provider of the solution. It’s a win-win
relationship, resulting in a long term
sustainable relationship rather than a
transaction.
• True innovation will not happen the first time,
and will get better with iterations.

38. Learn
• Learn from failures instead of sweeping it
under the carpet.
• Sometimes trying something, knowing it will
fail may yield unexpected learning outcomes.
• Knowing and going through failures make
solutions more sustainable with
improvements and variations.

39. Consequence
• Innovation is often a consequence of positive
culture, behavior and positive working
environment.

40. PART 4

41. Ask the Right Questions

42. Positive Mindset
• Think positive, everything is possible.
• Instead of asking, “Can a handicapped person
drive?”, framing the question differently can
be empowering to think deeper, ask, “How
can a handicapped person drive?”
• Changing from “Can” to “How Can” questions
the premise instead of the person.

43. Focus
• Have clear objectives you want to achieve.
• It is good to have some small innovation to
boost confidence, but focus on things that
make the biggest difference or achieve
greatest impact.
• Don’t focus on activity. Raise level of
ambition.

44. New Blood
• Innovation can come from new hires as well.
• Instead of looking for people with the
excellent qualifications, finding the right
candidate with the right attitude and having a
good induction program may be cheaper too.
• Forget probation and training, have a good
support system to ensure they don’t fail.
• Personalize support, focus on people’s
strength, and give them what they need.

45. New Blood
• Start referrals. Get employees/volunteers to
bring friend/consultants to support activities.
Get funding and pay fairly. Leveraging on
relationships, you may find great people.
Some of them may donate money too!
• Use technology and social tools to engage new
hires and volunteers. Make it fun.
• Think about the team. When a new person
joins the team, dynamics change and broaden
focus on the team to support as well.

46. PART 5

47. Leading Innovation
• While senior executives cite innovation as an
important driver of growth, few of them
explicitly lead and manage it.
• As with any top-down initiative, KPI driven
executives chase short term goals. Innovation
is inherently associated with change and takes
attention and resources away from achieving
those goals.
• Executives pay lip service to innovation but
doing nothing about it, inhibiting it.

48. Other Inhibitors
• The failure of executives to model
innovation—encouraging behavior, such as
risk taking and openness to new ideas, places
second.
• Rewarding nothing but short-term
performance and maintaining a fear of failure
also make it to the top of the list of inhibitors.

49. How to Advance Innovation?
• Define the kind of innovation that drives
growth and helps meet strategic objectives.
– When senior executives ask for substantial
innovation in the gathering of consumer insights,
the delivery of services, or the customer
experience, for example, they communicate to
employees the type of innovation they expect. In
the absence of such direction, employees will
come back with incremental and often familiar
ideas.

50. How to Advance Innovation?
• Add innovation to the formal agenda at
regular leadership meetings.
– This approach sends an important signal to
employees about the value management attaches
to innovation.

51. How to Advance Innovation?
• Set performance metrics and targets for
innovation.
– Leaders should think about two types of metrics: the
financial and the behavioral.
• What metrics would have the greatest effect on how people
work? How new innovation could save current cost by 20%
within 3 years.
• Another established targets for potential fundraising from
new ideas in order to ensure that they would be substantial
enough to affect its performance. Leaders can also set
metrics to change ingrained behavior, such as the “not
invented here” syndrome, by requiring 25 percent of all
ideas to come from external sources.

52. Innovation Network
• Since new ideas seem to spur more new ideas,
networks generate a cycle of innovation.
• Furthermore, effective networks allow people
with different kinds of knowledge and ways of
tackling problems to cross-fertilize ideas.
• By focusing on getting the most from innovation
networks, leaders can therefore capture more
value from existing resources, without launching
a large-scale change-management program.

53. Innovation Network
• Middle managers generally are the ones with the
most negative attitude toward innovation and
were also the most highly sought after for advice
about it.
• They served as bottlenecks to the flow of new
ideas and the open sharing of knowledge.
• Either get a network of middle managers to
generate bigger and newer ideas or connect
senior management to the innovation network.

54. Innovation Network

56. What Inhibits Innovation

57. Building Trust
• The cultural attributes that inhibit innovation:
a bureaucratic, hierarchical, and fearful
environment.
• Corporate-wide change programs not only are
daunting and time consuming but also often
have only a limited impact.
• Top teams can help build a more innovative
culture.

58. Building Trust
• Embrace innovation as a top team.
– It’s not enough for the CEO to make innovation a
personal goal and to attend meetings on
innovation regularly. Members of the top team
must agree that promoting it is a core part of the
company’s strategy, reflect on the way their own
behavior reinforces or inhibits it, and decide how
they should role-model the change and engage
middle management.

59. Building Trust
• Turn selected managers into innovation
leaders.
– Identify managers who already act, to some
degree, as network brokers and improve their
coaching and facilitation skills so that they can
build the capabilities of other people involved in
innovation efforts more effectively. The goal:
making networks more productive.

60. Building Trust
• Create opportunities for managed
experimentation and quick success.
– This approach is the best way to start any change
effort in large organizations.
– Quick success matters even more with innovation:
people need to see results and to participate in
the change.
– To get going quickly and learn along the way,
select an innovation theme or topic area and then
create small project teams.

61. Building Trust
• Create opportunities for managed
experimentation and quick success.
– While you try out topics and ideas, test the most
effective leadership and organizational approaches for
your organization.
– The goal isn’t to get it right the first time but to move
quickly to give as many influential employees as
possible a positive experience of innovation, even if a
project doesn’t generate profits immediately.
– A positive experience will make all the difference in
building the organization’s capabilities and
confidence.

62. Final Words
• Innovation is a big idea with big potential.
• Be sure to prototype it and work in small
steps, implementing one or few ideas and
grow the team.
• Be sure to create value and have fun!

63. For more information join in the conversation at
https://www.facebook.com/socialhub