While there are many skills that help us to investigate ideas, we will focus on six core attributes critical to this phase of innovation:
- To be analytical and structured
- To work things through carefully and methodically
- To involve customers and those who would benefit from an idea
- To make sure the idea has potential to meet a real need
- To help others be more methodical and organised in their thinking
- To create an envivornment where people are encouraged to explore and question
Let us look at each one in turn.
Below is a top-line summary of the skills and a selection of tools and activities for the area of investigate.
| Skills | Tools | Activities |
| To be analytical and structured | Develop a selection criteria | Insert the pause button |
| To work things through carefully and methodically | Proposition development The Three Horizons | Research questions |
| To involve customers and those who would benefit from an idea | Design Thinking | |
| To make sure the idea has potential to meet a real need | Prototyping | Research methods |
| To help others be more methodical and organised in their thinking | Six Thinking Hats® | |
| To create an envivornment where people are encouraged to explore and question | Ask good questions |
SKILL ONE – Being able to be analytical and structured
Investigate has been one of my lowest areas of strength. Despite having a background in research, and being highly analytical, my core strengths are in the area of identify and ignite. I like to explore opportunities and generate new ideas. Speed is of the essence. I am impatient. I want to move into action. As the Nike brand says, ‘Just Do It’. While laudable in some ways, this can lack objectivity or standing back and testing to see if an idea is a really good idea. My friend and colleague Lillian Ing, a clinical psychologist who has been working with us using The Six ‘I’s® Model, helped shift my mindset by reframing how I saw the investigate phase of innovation. She said a wonderful thing that has stuck with me ever since. ‘Insert the pause’. Stop, take a breath, look at what you are doing, can it be done better or differently, is the idea going to help you meet your Purpose? I am learning to love this space now of investigation and holding the often tricky balance between being passionate and detached.
As The Six ‘I’s® profiling tool measures self-perception of skills, it is possible to retake the assessment and track changes over time. I have retaken the assessment several times over the past few years and have noticed an improvement in my scores as I have consciously built my investigate skills.
Contrary to popular opinion, some ideas are not good ideas. We need to be willing to be dispassionate, particularly about ideas that are our own, and be able to stand back and analyse and assess them and, if necessary, put them on hold, wait for the right time, improve them or let them go.
ACTIVITY
Insert the pause button
Noun: a temporary stop in action or speech.
Synonyms: cessation, break, check, lull, respite, breathing space, hiatus, gap, interlude.
- Print up the definition of a pause or write it down. Place it somewhere where you will see it frequently.
- Pause.
- Repeat.
TOOLS
Develop a selection criteria
- Think of criteria by which you want to assess your ideas, particularly if you have a lot of ideas and you are not quite sure what to focus on. Create ‘selection criteria’. These could include elements such as:
- Rank your ideas using your selection criteria and analyse and assess them. Be careful not to drop the novel ones and just pick the ones that are easy to implement. If you do this, then the innovative aspect of your idea will be lost. Investigate how you can make the novel ideas work.
| Area | Description |
| Novelty | To what degree is the idea different, or unique? |
| Relevance | Will it help to adress your PURPOSE? |
| Potential Return on Investment | Will it potentially add more value than cost? |
| Ease of Implementation | How difficult will it be to implement time, resource and manpower? |
| Desirability | Is this something that a customer really wants and is willing to pay for and use? |
| Scalability | Is it easy to replicate, or scale? Is it sustainable? |
TOOLS
The Three Horizons
The Three Horizons, featured in the book The Alchemy of Growth (Baghai, Coley and White), is a very useful way of thinking about the potential impact of an idea that you are creating. It also helps to give a framework for a range of innovations – from the incremental, small changes to how things are being done, to the more radical – innovations which change or create new markets and business models.
Horizon 1 – This horizon represents ‘business as usual’. As change occurs, what exists starts to feel out of place or no longer fit for Purpose. This is where more smaller steps or incremental innovation starts to take place.
Horizon 2 – This horizon is where new opportunities for doing things quite differently start to emerge. It is often one of the most difficult areas to innovate in as it requires holding the balance of what is needed today, while looking to the future.
Horizon 3 – This is the horizon where radical innovation occurs. Completely new ways of doing things that are very different to the status quo disrupt and create new opportunities for change.
- Look at your ideas.
- What type of innovation Horizon do they belong to?
- What are the implications for how you manage current performance while maximising future opportunities for growth? Your idea will need different types of management depending on what Horizon it belongs to.
| Idea | Horizon 1 | Horizon 2 | Horizon 3 | Implications |
SKILL TWO – Being able to work things through carefully and methodically
Innovating is an iterative process. What I mean by this is that you will go backwards and forwards, particularly around the first three ‘I’s – identify, ignite and investigate as you seek to work out what the opportunity is and what solutions will best meet the needs that you are trying to address. As it can be quite unpredictable, develop a systematic way of thinking things through. If we want to bring ideas into the world, they need to be robust and based on real insights, not just random good ideas that cannot be developed or used. This means being clear on how you articulate your idea, the need it is addressing and the components of how it will work. A term often used in the business world is value proposition design. So, what is a proposition?
A proposition is a way to capture and communicate an idea to the people you want to engage with, based on their needs. It describes the core of an idea, its benefits and why the person should buy, or use the solution, you are proposing.
In three words it communicates relevancy, uniqueness and value. You need to think it through and keep honing the value proposition until it is easy to understand and communicate.
Research:
- Your competition (what are they offering that is similar)
- Your market place (how ready is it for what you want to offer)
- Your potential customers or users (does it address their needs)
ACTIVITY
Research questions
Think through the best way for you to systematically research your ideas.
- Who do you need to talk to?
- Where do you need to find out more information?
- What experts can help you accelerate your learning?
- What is your competition offering?
TOOLS
Proposition development
Pick one of the stronger insights that you have developed and an idea that you think will address the need you have isolated. Have a go at writing your own proposition. Use the following table as a guide.
SKILL THREE – Being able to involve customers and those who would benefit from an idea
The term design thinking, popularised in the business world by the Californian design company, IDEO, is becoming a more accepted practice and approach for the creation and development of new solutions in many organisations. It is a person-centred, prototype-driven process for innovation that can be applied to different areas such as products, services, processes and business model design. Design Thinking incorporates the ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet customer needs. Empathy is a very important skill for us to develop if we want to innovate more effectively. It is about feeling with people, not for them; it is about making connection, and seeing the world from their perspective. One way we can practise this is through observing and interviewing others – learning about those for whom we want to innovate, generating solutions, building prototypes or representations of the solution and testing them out with the people that will use them. This requires us to get out of our meeting rooms, beyond the borders of our organisations and observe, understand and engage with those for whom we want to provide new solutions. This will help to ensure that what is being created is going to have value.
TOOLS
Design thinking
Apply a Design Thinking approach to your innovation challenge:
- Observe and interview potential customers (identify).
- Create insights (identify).
- Generate ideas for new solutions (ignite).
- Build prototypes or representations of your ideas and solutions and test them out with the people that will use them (investigate), iterate and improve.
Design Thinking, empathy building and how to observe others are very rich subjects in and of themselves and many people are specialists in these fields. There are many comprehensive books on these subjects. The important thing for you to remember, as you innovate at work, is to think about how to apply these approaches to create rich and compelling solutions that will add value to your customers and help you to achieve your goals.
DID YOU KNOW?
Airbnb, an online business that enables home owners to share rooms with travellers, started as yet another bed and breakfast startup in the loft of its founders, but it was on the verge of bust when revenues plummeted to $200 per week in 2009. The three founders, along with their first investor, decided to do some brainstorming to find out the problem. One reason, they discovered, was the lack of quality images on their website. So, they packed their bags, rented a camera, visited places and replaced the poor-quality images with beautiful high-resolution ones. This doubled their revenues within a week.
As their mentality shifted, they realised they needed to go out, meet customers and come up with clever real-world solutions. Airbnb went ahead to embed a design-thinking approach everywhere in the company. Airbnb employees take a trip in their first or second week after joining. They capture customer struggles by venturing into their shoes and document their experience to share with other employees. New employees are asked to come up with new features on their first day at the company and every employee is encouraged to come up with innovative ideas.
Source: Pankaj – https://inkoniq.com/blog/how-design-thinking-transforming-the-world-and-lives-of-millions/
What this story can illustrate is that it is important not to try to create solutions in isolation from those that may eventually benefit from them. You need to meet customers, or potential customers, not assume that just because you have a good idea it will work. Sometimes, the solutions do not have to be world breaking, they can be small ideas that have a significant impact – like the improvement that high-quality photographs had on the Airbnb website.
SKILL FOUR – Being able to make sure the idea has potential to meet a real need
Remember the definition of an idea, outlined at the beginning of the book. An idea is a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action that generates in the mind. An idea is not an innovation. A lot has to happen before an idea can move into being deemed innovative and this is really important to remember. If we just jump from idea (ignite) into implementation, then we miss out the critical stage of finding out whether our idea is useful, not just novel. This is why developing a proposition, an outline of what you want to develop and why it will be useful, is so necessary at this stage. Go back to skill two and find out how. There can be a temptation, once you have an idea, just to start developing it in isolation to the people that might use it without ever showing them what it is you want to offer.
ACTIVITY
Research methods
Look at the proposition that you have written. What is the best way to test and research it? Depending on what you have created, there are many ways to research and test your ideas. They could include:
TOOLS
Prototyping
Develop a prototype. There are a number of ways to test a prototype:
- A mock-up of a product
- A story board
- An illustration
- A web application or test website
- A mock-up of a service offering
- A customer experience design
- An advertisement
Pilots or trial offers of your solution can also help to test a proposition in real time to see how it works and what people think. This is a particularly great way to test a service. Think about giving a small group of potential customers a discount in exchange for feedback.
SKILL FIVE – Being able to help others be more methodical and organised in their thinking
It is one thing for us to start to get better at standing back from our ideas and to be able to think them through, but can you encourage other people to do so as well? This is about being better at leading and working with others, which will start to affect the environment and culture in which you work. What can happen often, when trying to innovate, is that, if you are working in a group or team, each person may be thinking about different things and in different directions, misunderstanding each other and not really thinking through what they are trying to do. Edward de Bono, in his famous book Six Thinking Hats, talks of how to separate thinking into six clear functions or roles so that you can approach, from different angles, the complexities of a problem. Each Hat has a colour and a Purpose: White (discuss facts), Red (discuss feelings), Green (generate creativity), Yellow (design benefits), Black (investigate cautions) and Blue (follow process). This allows groups to orientate their thinking in a systematic way and, in so doing, to think together more effectively so as to produce better results. This form of lateral or parallel thinking can aid the development of ideas, allowing for a focused, systematic and coordinated approach.
TOOLS
Six Thinking Hats®
- Do you naturally wear one of the Hats more than others?
- How could you apply this way of thinking to your innovation challenge?
- If you are a leader, or team manager, practise wearing the Blue Hat (process).
- Facilitate others to think things through from the thinking directions of the different Hats.
- If you do not consider yourself systematic, find someone you know who is.
- Encourage them to ask questions to provoke and challenge you to think things through from different perspectives.
SKILL SIX – Being able to create an environment where people are encouraged to explore and question
When we are small children, asking questions is something that we all do very naturally. It is estimated that, at the age of 3, children ask 300 questions a day, no doubt infuriating their parents. It is no surprise that the decline in our ability to be creative coincides with the decline in our ability to ask questions. ‘Stop asking so many questions,’ a frustrated parent may say. ‘This is the way to do something,’ a manager may tell. As we grow older and busier, we have less and less time to stand back from what we are doing and ask ourselves, and others, questions.
Here are four tips to help create a culture of inquiry:
- Encourage leaders and managers to ask ‘what if?’
- Within meetings, put on your agenda, ‘What questions do we need to ask ourselves?’ and create space for reflection.
- Encourage and reward experimentation; build this into the INVESTIGATE phase as a way of working.
- Teach people how to ask questions, and equip them with the tools, knowledge and time to practice and learn.
ACTIVITY
Ask good questions
There are many great books and approaches on how to get better at asking questions, some of which I have outlined in the Resource Guide at the end of this chapter.
- This week, reframe, at least once a day, what you want to say to someone else into a question.
You are banned from saying ‘Have you tried this …?’ This is not a question of enquiry. - Use open-ended questions that will invite someone to open up and tell you about their situation and what they think.
- Ring-fence some funding for yourself (or others) to test potential solutions with customers or to conduct experiments.
- Set some time aside each month for yourself and others to get out of your, or their, normal day-to-day working routines and spend time out of the office talking to and listening to customers.
Dangers of Missing Out the INVESTIGATE Stage
- You (or your team) may have ideas but lack a clear value proposition (what is the benefit to someone and why would they buy or use it)?
- Ideas may not be workable or implementable.
- Ideas may be weak and lack rigour.
- Ideas generated may not be based on real customer or market insight.