Defining Innovation is a team alignment workshop. Following this process will ensure alignment amongst stakeholders and will result in a higher level of clarity of what innovation represents for your company.
HOW TO DO IT?
You need to work through the template horizontally and iteratively starting from left to right. You begin the workshop by asking the participants to define innovation in their own words. After they have written their answers on sticky notes, try to cluster similar definitions. You will probably be left with a handful of clusters. Add them to “iteration 1” under the first question in the template.
Continue in the same manner with the other four questions without challenging the participants. Now that you have initial answers to the questions, start the second iteration.
Look at the answers in “iteration 1” and begin challenging the participants with questions such as: why do you think this? What makes you say this? Tell me more about this. The goal here is to reduce the number of clusters by half and to create new answers that everyone agrees with. Continue the process for each question.
Once you are done with the 2nd iteration, you can start the 3rd one. The goal of the 3rd iteration is to reach one single answer for each of the questions.
WHY 3 ITERATIONS?
From experience, the authors of this template found that groups of 15+ people will require, on average, three iterations to come up with an answer the entire group agrees upon. But, depending on the size and composition of your group, you might need more iterations or fewer.
