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Table of Contents

Innovation Activities

Innovation Resources
Grow your innovation capabilities by applying creative problem solving to different aspects of your
organization and moving people toward new ways of working.

Innovation Activities

ACTIVITY

Define Your Purpose

Purpose is an essential quality of innovative
1
organizations. This 4-step exercise will help you
Chat

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define a reason for your organization to exist

beyond making money.

ACTIVITY

Use Customer Journey Maps to

Uncover Innovation Opportunities
Develop more empathy with, and gain new insights
about, your users through this journey map
activity.

ACTIVITY

Innovation Accounting: What It Is

and How to Get Started
A way of evaluating progress when all the metrics
typically used in an established organization
(revenue, customers, ROI, market share) are
effectively zero.

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ACTIVITY

Explore Analogous Inspiration

One of the best ways to get inspired is to look
outside your context. IDEO designers often use
analogous inspiration to gain a fresh perspective.

ACTIVITY

Envision a Future
Get in the mindset of asking “what future do we
want to create?” and how do we work backward to
get there? Design fiction is one way we do that.

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Six Qualities Essential to Innovation

Purpose
A clear, inspiring reason for the organization to exist—beyond making money.

Looking Out
Looking beyond the organization’s walls to understand customers, technologies, and cultural shifts.

Experimentation
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The degree to which an organization is able to explore new ideas quickly and inexpensively.

Collaboration
Working together across functions to approach opportunities and challenges from all angles.

Empowerment
Providing a clear path to create change in all corners of the organization by reducing unnecessary constraints.

Refinement
Elegantly bridging vision and execution.

Research on What Makes Innovative

Teams Successful
At IDEO, we’ve used a digital tool to assess, guide, and track the development of creative and innovative teams
and to measure innovation in more than 600 teams. We found that leaders who create effective and
sustainable work environments give their teams more capacity to experiment and solve problems in creative
ways.

Teams who use their purpose to guide their decision-making have 61% more successful launches than
teams that don’t.

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Teams who work collaboratively and have flexible spaces and tools to experiment are 32% more successful
than teams that don’t.
Teams who test five or more solutions in parallel are 42% more likely to create successful solutions than
teams that don’t do rapid prototyping.
Teams who have access to information about prior initiatives are 51% more likely to create successful
solutions.

How to Create an Innovative Work

Environment
Create a Shared Vision
Identify who you’re serving, what value your team can provide, and what you need to achieve your goals.

Let Your Teams Influence Their Space

Design an environment that encourages the collaboration and experimentation crucial to creative work, while
also empowering teams to adapt as new challenges arise.

Learn How Your Teams Actually Work

Make sure to check in with your teams to get a sense of what they love, loathe, and want to tweak about the way
your organization works.

Start With Prototypes

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The key isn’t to start with the perfect solution but to arrive at something that works and continuously
improves. Prototyping is an iterative process, so teams should be given the freedom to test a lot of ideas.

Codify and Share What You Learn

As teams grow and mature, the lessons they gather from experimenting with their work environments should
be packaged and shared with the larger organization.

Innovation Frameworks

Innovation Portfolio
Innovation is best as a portfolio approach with a
balance between short-term, predictable growth
(incremental), and longer-term riskier bets
(revolutionary).
By mapping innovation efforts along a horizontal
axis representing existing to new ideas/offerings
and a vertical axis representing existing to new
users, companies can get a good picture of the
balance of their innovation efforts.

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Desirability, Feasibility, Viability

Design thinking brings together what is desirable
from a human point of view with what is
technologically feasible and economically viable.
Desirability: What makes sense to people and for
people?
Feasibility: What is functionally possible within
the foreseeable future?
Viability: What is likely to become part of a
sustainable business model?

The Creative Process

The Creative Process contains multiple cycles of
iteration—with each phase, you move closer to a
refined solution.
In Divergence—teams go wide to find insights and
generate new ideas.
In Convergence—teams narrow their focus by
refining ideas and synthesizing information.

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Innovation Resource Library

Here you’ll find everything from free business prototyping tools to online innovation certificate programs to
get your team on a path towards scaling creative problem solving within your organization.

VIDEO

The Strategy Process Map

A framework for navigating strategy

VIDEO

The Strategy Choice Cascade

A way to articulate strategy

VIDEO

Strategy is a Creative Act For Everyone

All the best strategies make something possible that does not now exist

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TOOL

The Business Model Canvas

A tool to help you map, design, discuss, and invent new business models

TOOL

Discovery-driven planning
A disciplined process to systematically uncover, test, and revise the assumptions behind a venture’s
plan

TOOL

Prototyping Tools
A list of physical and digital prototyping tools

ONLINE CERTIFICATE

Business Innovation Certificate

Make strategic choices and turn ideas into reality

ONLINE COURSE

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Designing Strategy
Unite rigor and creativity to create a successful strategy

ONLINE COURSE

Designing a Business
Build and test new business ideas

VIDEO

Why Prototype?
Instead of taking a long time planning, take action and build a prototype to get started learning

VIDEO

Prototyping Your Business

Answer big questions with small experiments

ARTICLE

How to Prototype a New Business

Applying the design approach to new business ventures with techniques like prototyping creates a
clearer path forward

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ARTICLE

6 Tips for How to Prototype a Service

Prototyping services is about aligning the needs of the end consumer with the capabilities of the
organization

ARTICLE

Turning Creative Ideas into Viable Companies

Using venture design to move from hypothesis to testing and prototyping, to rapid iterations

ARTICLE

Why Generating Insights is an Important Skill

The purpose of insights is to connect head and heart knowledge—information plus inspiration

ARTICLE

6 Tips from IDEO Designers on How to Unlock Insightful Conversation

Tips on how to make people feel more comfortable during design research interviews

ARTICLE

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Innovation Thrives Under These 5 Evidence-Backed Conditions

Executing innovative ideas requires creativity, and creativity thrives in a work environment that fits the
dynamic needs of modern teams

ARTICLE

Tom Kelley on How to Inspire Creativity in Your Company

Scaling creativity and unlocking creative potential throughout an organization

ARTICLE

How to create change in your organization

A common purpose, building momentum, and sustaining change

ARTICLE

This is the Way Google & IDEO Foster Creativity

The importance of psychological safety, moonshots, and beacons

ARTICLE

6 Qualities That Build an Environment of Creativity

The fundamental things people need to be creative problem solvers

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ARTICLE

How to Overcome Barriers to Innovation in Your Organization

Embrace constraints, focus on people, empower middle managers, and more

ARTICLE

Tim Brown on Nudging Your Company Culture Toward Creativity

Designing rituals and keeping ideas from being squashed

ARTICLE

How Great Teams Leverage Tension as a Source for Innovation

As Daniel Coyle says, collaboration is the art and sport of channeling and unlocking tension and using it
in a positive way

ARTICLE

10 Activities to Generate Better Ideas

Try these exercises with your team to practice a divergent mindset and generate lots of great new ideas

ARTICLE

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Divergent Thinking and the Innovation Funnel

Spend more time ideating, prototyping, and sharing your ideas

ARTICLE

Why leadership is not about having all the answers

If you think as a leader you can and should have all the answers, then you’re significantly constraining
the capacity of the organization to be creative

ARTICLE

4 Tips for Navigating Ambiguity

When navigating ambiguity, instead of a finite plan, you’re choreographing moments where people come
together to make progress

ARTICLE

3 Myths of Creativity & Ways to Overcome Creative Blocks

Creativity is like a muscle that needs to be flexed to stay strong

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ARTICLE

What is Design Thinking?

Learn about a process for creative problem solving

ARTICLE

Why Design Thinking is Relevant

A methodology that helps you feel comfortable wading into the messy complexity of creating something
new to the world

BOOK

Art of Innovation
Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm

BOOK

Ten Faces of Innovation

IDEO’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate & Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization

BOOK

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Change By Design
How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

BOOK

Creative Confidence
Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

ONLINE COURSE

Cultivating Creative Collaboration

Tap into diverse perspectives to foster creative thinking

ONLINE COURSE

Designing for Change

Start small, start with people, start now

ONLINE COURSE

From Ideas to Action

Learn to prototype, experiment, and iterate to move your ideas forward

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ONLINE COURSE

Insights for Innovation

Learn to use insights to turn customer needs into human-centered solutions

ONLINE COURSE

Power of Purpose
Learn to work and lead with purpose

ONLINE COURSE

Unlocking Creativity
Exercises to overcome the common barriers to creativity

More Guides

GUIDE

Innovation Overview
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Learn why creativity is essential for innovation

and better understand the business case for
building a creative and innovative team and
organization.

GUIDE

Brainstorming Overview
Learn more about brainstorming and the creative
process.

GUIDE

Design Thinking Resources

Tips, tools, and techniques to help you practice and
apply design thinking.

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