Innovation Workshop Activities

You can help groups reflect on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict.

It is possible for every voice to be heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction. Progressing in stages makes this practical—from collecting facts about What Happened to making sense of these facts with So What and finally to what actions logically follow with Now What. The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do. Voila!

It doesn’t matter where you work and what your job role is, if you work with other people together as a team, you will always encounter the same challenges:

• Unclear goals and miscommunication that cause busy work and overtime
• Unstructured meetings that leave attendants tired, confused and without clear outcomes.
• Frustration builds up because internal challenges to productivity are not addressed
• Sudden changes in priorities lead to a loss of focus and momentum
• Muddled compromise takes the place of clear decision- making, leaving everybody to come up with their own interpretation.
• In short, a lack of structure leads to a waste of time and effort, projects that drag on for too long and frustrated, burnt out teams.
  

World Café is a simple yet powerful method, originated by Juanita Brown, for enabling meaningful conversations driven completely by participants and the topics that are relevant and important to them. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and provide simple guidelines. Participants then self-organize and explore a set of relevant topics or questions for conversation.

Ideation and Concept Development is a process for groups to work creatively and collaboratively to generate creative ideas. It’s a general approach that can be adapted and customized to suit many different scenarios. It includes basic principles for idea generation and several steps for groups to work with. It also includes steps for idea selection and development.

1. Review key information
2. Start design work on paper, 
3. Consider multiple variations,
4. Create a detailed solution.

The purpose of Future Map is to create a shared view of industry trends in the recent past, present, and future. In the workshop, participants map key trends from the past year, the current year, and three years ahead. They then review the map, identify patterns and discuss the relevance of different trends. It is useful for supporting discussion and debate around high-level themes: society, technology, politics, etc.

Mash-ups is a collaborative idea generation method in which participants come up with innovative concepts by combining different elements together. In a first step, participants brainstorm around different areas, such as technologies, human needs, and existing services. In a second step, they rapidly combine elements from those areas to create new, fun and innovative concepts. Mash-ups demonstrates how fast and easy it can be to come up with innovative ideas.

Client-centricity” (or “client-focus”) is an approach to business based on putting the client/customer at the center of an organization's philosophy, strategy, and operations. This exercise promotes collaborative exploration and reflection around an organization’s approach to its clients. Participants discuss and share positive experiences they have had as clients, and use this to define their approach to “client-centricity” as a group. They discuss different groups of clients based on needs, and explore how successfully the organization has met those needs in the past. The exercise ends with a prioritization of areas for improvement.

This simple and powerful method is useful for getting to the core of a problem or challenge. As the title suggests, the group defines a problems, then asks the question “why” five times, often using the resulting explanation as a starting point for creative problem solving.