Innovator's Playbook

1Get Started

Before you start your project you’ll need to assemble a crack multidisciplinary team and clearly define the opportunity area you want to innovate. You’ll tighten up its focus and scope, getting alignment with your team, sponsor and key stakeholders. Finally, you’ll have fun designing a space to play home for your team. In this stage you will learn how to set up for success.

So you’ve decided to go on an innovation journey. How do you set yourself and your team up for success on a journey that will be unpredictable, complex and ambiguous at times, and iterative, not linear, in nature? Before you dive into the real work of identifying customer needs you need to make sure you and your team are ready to get started.

In this chapter I’ll show you how to set yourself up for success. (Keep in mind this chapter isn’t meant to be a replacement for good project management —you’ll need that too — or the development of a proper innovation strategy.)

Preparing your team

Innovation is a team sport. I liken it to team orienteering rather than a relay race. Not only is the orienteering trail more unpredictable than an athletics track, it also requires the team to work together side by side to navigate their way around the course, unlike handing over a baton to the next runner in a relay. Too often in organisations we work in our siloed departments, doing handovers from one team to the next. At each handover we risk losing the integrity of the original insights and ideas, as ...