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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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