Self-Innovation Guide

From Acorns to Forests:

Step-by-Step Idea Growth & Development

by Darin Eich, Ph.D. InnovationLearning.org

Module 1 A system for systematic front end of innovation Generating ideas on purpose. Hi, Im Darin Eich, President of BrainReactions and an innovation speaker, facilitator, and program developer. Welcome to your self-innovation guide. Consider this to be a mini innovation e-course where I guide you through the innovation journey! I will share with you what we have learned developing and facilitating a simple front end of innovation process. You can use this system to develop and communicate your big idea in a more systematic and effective way. The projects we have done for a wide variety of organizations from P&G and the UN to solo entrepreneurs and college students all use a similar system and activities. They all started with a problem or opportunity, led to brainstorming questions, continued with ideas, and led to selection and development of the best ideasjust like you can do with your own project.

If you want to develop an innovative idea for your project where do you start? First, practice a system of innovation best practices. You will go about this purposefully with a process or system you use to develop your ideas into more validated and robust concepts. This means generate multiple ideas and then synthesize relevant multiple ideas logically together in the form of a well-developed concept. It is important to capture and store all of these ideas in one place. Also, great innovations are not solitary work. They are the result of collaborations. Involve others to help you generate ideas, develop the concept, validate the concept, and communicate the concept so that is meaningful and memorable. In a free brainreactions.net private brainstorming Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org 2

room you can pose your question, provide background, visuals in the form of a photo or video, and generate ideas. With the free room you can include up to five brainstormers and these brainstormers can not only generate ideas but also vote, select, and sort the best ideas to move forward and develop. This is a way to involve collaborators in your innovation system. You can also do this with basic tools, such as Word on your computer or even just a sheet of paper. Just be sure to capture what you are doing! Get it out of your mind and stored somewhere where you can revisit it and share with others. An important start to an idea generating for innovation project is to crystallize the problems and challenge that you intend to solve with new ideas and pose important questions that are grounded in that problem or opportunity for innovation. Google launched a campaign that solicited concept ideas to change the world. To use Googles Project 10^100 framework as an example, they offered seven suggested categories and questions: 1. Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures? 2. Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families? 3. Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy? 4. Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem? 5. Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives? 6 Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education? 7. Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live? These are examples of categories and related questions to start. These categories were selected because they offer real problems and opportunity. These are starting places, if your vision is to change the world then the seven google categories and questions may be beneficial starting places for you. Odds are yours may be different and related to the problems or opportunities that exist for you or your organization, specific to your mission. These starting places are big questions of their own or can catalyze subquestions for you to purposefully generate ideas on. Action 1: Clarify a simple system you will use to innovate. Use the model we are presenting or customize your own. Know that you are engaging in a system to innovate and what that system is. Identify and write down the areas you would like to innovate in. These are problems or opportunities. Research them. Create questions to ask. Keeping a journal or a specific document dedicated to your innovation project will be helpful. Write everything down. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Need systematic innovation in your organization? Darin can help you set it up. He can work with you to establish a program and guide your team step by step through this innovation system and over 30 different activities that you can do for your own challenge and learn to do again and again to contribute to a sustainable culture of innovation within your organization. Email Dr. Darin Eich at darin@innovationlearning.org for ideas!

Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org

Module 2 Innovation System Stage: Research to Identify Problems and Opportunities Use short online surveys to gain direction and validation from your stakeholders before generating new ideas From the first lesson, you should now have an innovation system to practice (we are guiding your through parts of it). You should also have a challenge in mind that is represented by problems and opportunities. You may even have some big brainstorming questions in mind related to this challenge. Now we want to do some research to make sure that we are moving in the right direction. We are about to innovate. Is there anything missing or something we hadnt thought of? What direction should we move in? How do we gain quick insight and validation to decide which questions we want to generate ideas on when innovating for new products or services, marketing, organizational, or personal improvement? If youve ever thought about these questions before launching a new innovation effort, a short and quick survey of your customers or stakeholders may be what is needed. One activity to use before formulating your brainstorm questions is to do a quick survey to get both write in ideas as well as selected answers. The answers help you validate the direction you are moving in and the write in ideas may shed light on any blindspots and provide something you hadnt thought of. Gathering a dozen responses to a short survey of no more than five questions that can be done in a couple of minutes can help you zero in on your direction for innovation before the brainstorm and on the concepts to invest development time in later.

Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org

SurveyMonkey is an effective and free online tool to help you conduct quick, short surveys to gather insights and validate the direction you choose for idea generation and innovation. It allows for your customers to co-create with you in a more engaging and interactive format. In our webinar series we delve deeper into activities like this to help you innovate in a direction that is co-created and validated by your customers. To provide a real example, we do online innovation workshops. We are seeking to create new webinars that match our expertise and our clients needs. The first webinar series (http://InnovationTraining.org) we did was created based on feedback and insights from clients on which topics they wanted us to cover and how to cover them. We then started looking for new insights to determine what to create next so we created a short survey. See for yourself short online surveys as an example of a web tool for innovation you can use for free: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=WnApQvAZmevimoKRFFg0gg_3d_3d The key is to keep it simple. You are looking for a direction to move in and new ideas. A four-question survey can do this. People can fill it out in a couple of minutes. Before generating ideas try to ask people in your network to clarify the challenge that they want solved through the survey. In addition to emailing a group you can also collect short survey insights through Twitter, Facebook, your blog, and other social media avenues that would allow people to simply click on the link to give you feedback on the specific innovation challenge you are working on. A short SurveyMonkey survey can be used before the idea generating stage to identify and clarify the challenges to solve and after you generate ideas on that direction to help focus in on which solutions to invest in developing further. Action 2: Create your own short survey to zero in on your direction for innovation. Gather insight from your stakeholders using SurveyMonkey or another online source. Based on the insight, finalize questions and prepare for the idea generation stage. Based on your validated problems or opportunities, write down a series of questions you would like ideas for. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Lets Connect! You can use social media to keep the innovation learning going and network with Darin on Facebook (search Innovation Learning by Darin Eich), Linked In, and Twitter (@darineich).

Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org

Module 3 Innovation System Stage: Ideation Generate A LOT of Ideas Based on the previous two lessons, you should have an innovation system and some questions to generate ideas on. You created these questions based on problems or opportunities related to your challenge and may have received validation from your stakeholders through a survey. One of the key fundamental purposes of the idea generating stage is to generate A LOT of ideas. The more ideas the more we have to work with to develop concepts. Ideas are like raw materials. Plus, we may hit a home run and generate a good idea in the first stage. If a baseball player steps to the plate 200 times they will have a better chance of hitting a homerun then if they just step to the plate 10 times. Their swing will probably get better after those first 10 at bats, and so will your ideas. One take away from this stagemore ideas are better. For many of our projects developing new products we create near 1,000 ideas. For your project in this mini e-course, 50 would be a good goal. So, how do you come up with a large number of ideas so you can develop a strong concept? First of all, we do it deliberately and purposefully. If you expect a bunch of brilliant ideas to come to you by chance, you are not going to get very far. You have to set out to come up with these ideas. Schedule time to do it. Plan to do it. Schedule a brainstorm or innovation session time, invite your collaborators, and execute. You started by selecting a category that you are passionate about, value, and have knowledge or experience in. You came up with many specific problems or opportunities within that category. You turned this problem or challenge into a question. These steps will make the idea generating easier, more focused, and more likely to develop a successful concept. For instance, on a project we did online, we worked the environment category from Googles project and then brainstormed solutions to the plastic bag problem as a question to dig deeper into with ideas. You can view an example of this plastic bag brainstorm at: http://www.brainreactions.net/brainstorms/1815

Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org

This process example that you can see includes a question stimulated from a problem, hundreds of generated ideas, collaborated ideas from multiple people, selection and voting of good ideas, and sorting of the most popular ideas. This simple process is valuable for creating better and more innovative ideas. What you want to do now is the fun part, idea generating. Focus on your question and list and number without judgment as many ideas as you can. Ask others to collaborate with you to list ideas as well. Focus on two key rules of brainstorming: 1. Generate as many ideas as possible, and 2. Do not judge your ideas. So why is it so important to have a process that yields a lot of ideas instead of just one that you get by chance? Generating many ideas is a process-oriented feature of very successful innovation systems in lots of successful organizations. When they develop new products they get many, many ideas in the pipeline. From there, they qualify the ideas and whittle them down into a handful of concepts. After that, they test the concepts while developing them more and may only end up with 1 new product from 100 product ideas. This is how ideation for innovation works. More importantly, when you come up with a large number of ideas it is easier to do good analysis. You can identify some themes that a lot of the ideas shared. Some ideas will lead to new and different ideas. You will learn a lot from looking at all of the ideas from above. You will see the forest from the trees. An innovation process is necessary to develop a better big idea. Action 3: Start generating a large number of ideas without judgment. Try to list 10 ideas right now. Brainstorm with a group or come up with a list of ideas for your question on your own. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Need hundreds of ideas? Need a brainstorm facilitator? How about different methods to generate ideas? Email darin@innovationlearning.org!

Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org

Module 4 Innovation System Stage: Analyze & Synthesize Ideas Owl Analysis: A Metaphor for a first round of analyzing ideas for innovation

The increasing emphasis on the need to innovate is leading organizations and individuals to collect more ideas to start down the innovation pipeline. The increase of brainstorming sessions, idea submissions, and contests to fuel ideas for innovation are leaving individuals with significant lists of ideas. Many ask us where to start and what to do next with their idea lists. This calls for a story and a metaphor. When I was in elementary school my class took a trip to small state park in Minnesota, Forestville. When one goes to Forestville it is natural to go into a forest, so that is what this group of 30 youngsters did. I remember the park ranger telling the kids that he would give a quarter to the first one that could find a grey ball in the forest. This was unusual to us, we had never heard of such a thing. But, we were up for the challenge and a quarter was a quarter and they had hard stick candy for only 10 cents at the old Forestville country store. As luck would have it I was the first to find this grey ball. I gave it to the ranger and he gave me the quarter. He then told us something amazing. He held up the grey ball in the woods and told us that it was once a mouse. I quickly looked at my hand and was grossed out. He then said that an owl will catch a mouse and eat the whole thing. The owl will digest all of the parts of the mouse that it needs and spit out what it doesnt need in this grey ball of fur and bones called an owl pellet. Fascinating.

Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org

I traveled to San Diego for a conference for innovation professionals from a wide variety of corporations. One thing that was interesting to me was that these professionals and their organizations had large amounts of ideas, could get many ideas, but what was needed was a way to quickly screen these ideas. During my speech I told the story of the owl and I suggest doing what the owl does to the mouse. Why not quickly take all of the ideas in, and then quickly only keep and devote energy to digesting those ideas that you need, are beneficial to you, and belong in you. These are the ideas that match your criteria and are for the reason why you gathered ideas in the first place. Everything else can be spat back out in a grey ball of fur and bones. In my world of idea generating more is better. More ideas are better than less ideas. The nice thing about ideas is that they are short and can be quickly read and judged. I regularly review, analyze, and synthesize lists of over 700 ideas and make quick decisions on them. The first stage is an important one, your quick review and selection of ideas. Many ideas just get read over because they already exist, are way too far out, or are not aligned with what the organization is about. But there are a fair amount of ideas that get digested and developed from this long list. This is valuable. The key is to not get intimidated by so many ideas and to be process focused. Process focused means understanding that generating a lot of ideas is key to discovering something new or creating something innovative. So, consolidate all those ideas and start spitting out some grey balls. It is also quite good to have at least a couple of owls analyzing ideas. What you digest may be different than what someone else digests, and you may be spitting out something that is healthy. When we work on our idea generation projects we have at least 2 formal owl analysts who digest everything and spit accordingly back into the idea list or bank them for future consideration. So, also important is to store all of the waste, those ideas that didnt make the cut. You never know when they could come in handy later. So, begin the work of an owl with digesting your idea list! Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org 9

Action 4: Review your idea list like an owl and highlight the good ideas. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Do you want to read more interesting stories like this that will help you innovate yourself or your challenge? Darin blogs more like this at InnovateYourself.com and InnovationLearning.org!

Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org

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Module 5 Innovation System Stage: Develop Concepts Developing Concepts through Systematically Evaluating, Analyzing, & Synthesizing ideas with Criteria When evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing ideas, it is good to select with criteria in mind. After your first stage of analysis where you select the good ideas from the rest, you will need to be more selective in pulling out the great from the good because it is these ideas that you will devote more energy to conceptualizing. Using criteria will help you to develop concepts that have a better chance of success because they are grounded in the criteria that have been established. Googles Project 10^100 has suggested five criteria: 1. Reach: How many people would this idea affect? 2. Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need? 3. Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two? 4. Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea? 5. Longevity: How long will the ideas impact last? You can create criteria specific to your challenge too. You can select your top ideas from the brainstorm (by hitting the good idea button on brainreactions.net) based on not only your passion for that idea but by how well it fits with the criteria. If it fits some of your criteria--or using the Google example has reach, depth, attainability, efficiency, and longevity then it is a tremendous idea! The criteria will also help you to compare ideas to determine which to develop further.

The Google Project 10^100 process asks you to conceptualize your idea by answering a few questions. You can do this for some of your best ideas. Many of these questions are

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deserving of their own brainstorm to converge on the best ideas or answers. These questions from this Google Project are: What one sentence best describes your idea? Describe your idea in more depth. What problem or issue does your idea address? If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how? What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground? Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it? Action 5: From your analysis produce 3 concepts that are more fully developed versions of selected original ideas. Write a few sentences about each concept to explain it more fully. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Darin does a number of different innovation workshops to help people learn and practice different parts of the innovation system. Visit http://DarinEich.com/workshops to see some program ideas for your organization or event!

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Module 6 Innovation System Stage: Communicate & Advance your Ideas Help others Hear and See your Innovative New Concepts You should now have a concept that is ready to be communicated to others. You need to do more than just develop a great concept. What is often times missing in success is being able to communicate your concept so that it is understandable, valuable and memorable. This helps with taking action on the concept, gaining buy in internally to launch it and externally to spread it. I like this cone of learning visual. I understand and remember it more because it is and image I see instead of just text to read. It is visual. This has relevance for innovators when they are trying to advance their creations by communicating them to others. When we are communicating our concepts people will get, retain, and learn more if you dont just let them read or hear, but also see or better yet hear and see. How can you tell and story and show people your innovations?

We host a webinar series where we teach people brainstorming and concept development through guiding them practically along the stages of the BrainReactions system. We will help people hear, see, and do. Most of us are communicating our creations on the web. Instead of just text why not try letting others hear and see? It is easier now to create your own videos that can do just this. Even a short rapidly created video will increase the potency of your communication over written words. Instead of a paragraph of text about Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org 13

the webinar series I will use one of the communication innovation tools and let you hear and see so that at the webinar you can do to learn and create more! Take a look at what even amateur video producers can create with basic software: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKMu_SSsss Use this as an example for how to communicate your own concept. How can you make it visual and help others to see, hear, and engage with the concept you created? How can they be a part of it or get their hands on it to understand it and want to be a part in advancing it? Activity 6: Create a message and plan to communicate your concept in an involving way. Create a visual or video about it. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Darin can do keynote speeches on innovation and ideas! Suggest him for an upcoming event or conference. Visit http://DarinEich.com to see some examples.

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Module 7 Sustainable Innovation Continuously Engage in the Innovation Process Congratulations! You have hopefully started all of the activities in the Innovation mini ecourse! You should have advanced through all of the stages we identified in this system. They included: Module 1 A system for systematic front end of innovation Generating ideas on purpose. Module 2 Innovation System Stage: Research to Identify Problems and Opportunities Use short online surveys to gain direction and validation from your stakeholders before generating new ideas Module 3 Innovation System Stage: Ideation Generate A LOT of Ideas Module 4 Innovation System Stage: Analyze & Synthesize Ideas Owl Analysis: A Metaphor for a first round of analyzing ideas for innovation Module 5 Innovation System Stage: Develop Concepts Developing Concepts through Systematically Evaluating, Analyzing, & Synthesizing ideas with Criteria Module 6 Innovation System Stage: Communicate & Advance your Ideas Help others Hear and See your Innovative New Concepts Now your task is to do it again. Repeat the modules. Sustain the innovation. Keep living in this process. Keep working the system. Continually be developing and communicating ideas. Innovative organizations are always innovating. They are always generating new ideas in response to the new problems and opportunities that are emerging. You can do the same thing. You are an innovator and that is what innovators doinnovation. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What did you think of this self-innovation guide? What are you innovating? Email darin@innovationlearning.org to share or to suggest an innovative collaborationlike a webinar!

Darin Eich, Ph.D. 2011 InnovationLearning.org

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