We hear it all the time from corporate innovation teams.

“We’ve run design sprints” and “we sourced hundreds of ideas using an idea challenge” but they usually haven’t done anything with the ideas beyond that because they lack a mechanism or roadmap to take ideas beyond ideas. We often hear that “it takes us months to run an experiment”.

Such narrative is not only holding back product development but it’s a recipe for disaster insofar as internal culture and knowledge management goes because it will only serve to fuel pessimism amongst the organisation’s most innovative and entrepreneurial thinkers who will seek greener pastures elsewhere.

We’re told it’s because there’s no funding or time to take ideas further but both of these reasons are poor excuses at best - especially when you consider how many millions of dollars and months of effort go into projects that ultimately tank because senior executives jumped to conclusions about what customers wanted,

However, the biggest and most legitimate barrier to taking next steps with ideas is:

(a) a preconception that early stage innovation is risky and costs a lot of money (the irony is that the cost of not running experiments means we often over-invest developing products based on untested assumptions); and

(b) a lack of awareness and knowledge of the tools available to accelerate prototyping and early stage innovation.

Day Spent On Rapid Prototyping with A Global FMCG

We recently facilitated a hack day for a global FMCG client, comprised of 10 cross functional employees, all of whom had the desire to innovate but lacked the methods and tools required to do so.

They had run some internal design sprints and had a handful of ideas to explore but weren’t sure how to go about taking them any further. By the end of the day they had not only built six prototypes but they also got out of the building and put the prototypes into the hands of target customers for relevant feedback from day one.

What the day looked liked

9am - 10:30am: A primer on the lean startup methodology

Teams were introduced to the fundamental aspects of the lean startup, captured as follows:

• A startup is any temporary institution looking to find product market fit for a new idea that has lots of untested assumptions - that often includes new product initiatives within large companies
• 95% of startups fail because of market failure - building what nobody wants to buy
• Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face
• Today, business plans based on hocus pocus assumptions about future events don’t stack up because technology and customer habits are changing far too quickly
• The 5% of startups that succeed do so because they relentlessly test their assumptions before overcommitting
• Initial ideas should be captured in a lean canvas - along with key problem, solution and customer segments
• Define key ‘leap of faith’ assumptions underpinning an idea
• Define experiments and develop prototypes to effectively test these assumptions
• Define key metrics to determine whether a test was successful or not - capture this in a validation board
• Put the prototype in your target customer’s hands, measure interactions and update validation board
• Capture learnings and update lean canvas
• Repeat as many times as necessary to find product market fit before running out of time or money

The Ideas

1. AR app to improve in venue engagement
2. AR venue finder mobile app
3. AR mobile app for in liquor store engagement
4. Happy hour bar finder app
5. Chatbot to engage sales reps
6. Online education for sales reps and liquor store staff

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