The development of innovative new ideas requires creativity. But quickly bringing those ideas to realization can benefit from having a structured framework of activities. The activities below can help ensure your success.
Goal setting
The first step is to understand the outcome you are looking to achieve. The approach and activities can be tailored toward your goal once it is understood.
- Define goals based on your business need
- Are you trying to solve a problem?
- Are you trying to improve an existing solution?
- Are you trying to leverage an emerging technology or trend?
Idea generation
The initial objective here is to generate as many ideas as possible. The evaluation of these ideas is completely removed from this part of the process. Evaluation will come later.
- Seed campaigns with ideas
- Create a call to action
- Solicit ideas
- Develop and refine ideas
Evaluation and hypotheses testing
These activities take the group of potential ideas which were generated and converge to those to a narrower group using a set of criteria.
- Establish evaluation criteria
- Select evaluation team
- Conduct evaluation to decide which ideas are worthy of further exploration
Value realization
- Create business case
- Kick-off project
- Define success criteria for the project
- Track project results
- Compare results to success criteria to justify continued investment
- Communicate value