Challenges spark Innovation

Many corporations still believe, that implementing agile organization styles, using modern open office designs and some free time for experimentation, are enough of an investment in order to harvest constant innovation, paving the road towards the future, while keeping teams engaged and business successful.

In reality innovation happens mostly when individuals, teams or cooperations are facing problems, which they are motivated, capable and entitled to solve.

Innovation might also happen when you add new and unexpected key features to already existing concepts. These new combinations will solve problems you did not even know they were existing, before you implemented the mix. Like linking phones with GPS and the internet.

But let's stay with the first idea, innovation as the effect of problem-solving activities.

Teams and individuals feel happier when they help to solve a meaningful, complex and important problem. Businesses are successful as long as they solve relevant problems for their customers.

In order to foster innovation, corporations and product teams have to implement the discovery of problems as a part of their process. To make this possible, cultural changes in the respective organizations are to be designed and implemented.

Transforming the culture from “only solutions are important” to “problems are important” is a basic. Otherwise one might just drown in opinionated ideas, which may or may not solve the problems of your customers. Remember “Love the problem, not your solution”, lean canvas?

The organization has to realize the urgency of a deep understanding of its customers problems and its own problems. On all levels, like the business model, product, design, brand, technology, internal processes and structures, planning, culture, values, leadership, you name it, all hide to some degree problems which are worth be solved at one point.

But which ones? How to identify them?

Simple answer: Use the motivation and knowledge of your teams.

Implement research or “sniff for problems” sprints. Checking through all the data, User Feedback, CS reportings etc. across of all disciplines. Usually the members of a product team (PO / UXD / DEV) already have a good sense for the realy important problems.

The outcome of these sprints is a “Problem backlog” (Or call it opportunity backlog, if this sounds any better to your ears). You might scale this backlog from a single product line to a whole brand.

Now, these problems have to be prioritized according to the potential benefits of the solution on one hand and the estimated invest of time and manpower on the other hand side. Finally, the product team is triggered to solve these problems.

Et voila, in order to solve the problem, depending on the complexity of the problem and the quality of the team, you will end up with some degree of innovation. The higher the complexity of the challenge, the higher the solution’s degree of innovation.

Caution:
Once the chosen problems are too simple to solve, you will just end up with a simulation of innovation: Incremental improvements.
If the chosen problems are too big and vague, you might burn out your team and your budget.

Its nothing wrong with incremental improvements,
only they are just incremental improvements and not innovation.

You may also cluster and prioritize the outcome of the discovery/research sprint (Disclaimer: Discovery here is not the same as the discovery phase in a design thinking process) according to the levels of innovation matrix, based on the understanding of innovation as the degree of “Newness” in anything what is created:

0: Nothing new

1: New to the individual

2: New to the team

3: New to the department

4: New to your organization

5: New to the world

This matrix might help you to estimate the degree of expected innovation upfront of solving any problem.

And finally, the question one should ask from time to time, regardless of your role and power, is: “Are we solving the right problems?”
In memory of all the corporations, teams, startups and talented people, who did not ask this question, when there was still time to do so.

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