Well, we've run our first Innovation Watering Hole and what an amazing day!
About 25 people responded positively to an invitation to come and spend three hours on a Friday afternoon with CIDA to help us shape the way we offer our Innovation programme to our different constituencies - we used three tools from our own Innovation process to develop the ideas and the offers, and everyone contributed enthusiastically, honestly and generously. It was a terrific afternoon AND hugely productive!
The people who came were a mixed bunch - people who had worked for CIDA or who had been clients of CIDA; people who knew about us and wanted to get involved in our Innovation work particularly; and people who had vaguely heard about us and were curious to know more. They ranged across many different disciplines - from painters and musicians to corporate lawyers and local authority officers ; marketing specialists and police detectives to personal stylists and economists; and including strategists and funders - most didn't know each other at the start but the mixed groups gelled very quickly around common interests - the post-event buzz at our Cafe Ollo reception was intense and noisy and people stayed for at least an hour after it had finished!
In fact, the whole event had been pretty intense. We only had three hours in which to cover a lot of ground but we managed it. Each group focused on a particular segment of CIDA's customer base, and brought their own knowledge, experience, intellect and imagination to identify key issues and potential responses to those issues. Each mapped the external environment as it affected their customer base, and then they applied CIDA's COSTAR process. This is a structure, created by our Silicon Valley innovation partners Herman Gyr and Laszlo Gryorffy and developed with CIDA, which provides a methodology for making innovation 'do-able', making sure that you are addressing all the different aspects that are essential if you are to move from merely having good ideas to actually making them happen, and critically to do it in a way that benefits both your customer and your company.
When they had done this, after about an hour, each group then presented their proposals to the others, galvanising reactions and thoughtful feedback from that audience. Whilst the mood was certainly supportive, no one shrunk from home truths - realism was the order of the day and we in CIDA came away with a pretty clear sense of what was and what wasn't achievable! There was a lot of laughter as people shared experiences in their groups and as people discovered common cause. For CIDA, there was real awe at the generosity of people giving up their afternoon to help us - and I think for everyone there was a sense of discovery and then achievement as we pulled together innovative ideas for implementation.
We now have a lot of work in front of us, but each group has an in house CIDA Project Champion who will take responsibility for seeing it to fruition. We will run a few more Rapid Improvement sessions on each, as we rehearse and rehearse, polishing the offer until we have it pitch-perfect! And whilst the in house groups are doing that, a group of our specialist Innovation Coaches, including Keith and me, will be out there, working with a wide range of customers, from micro businesses to local authorities, actually helping them, where appropriate, to generate ideas and then to successfully exploit those ideas for the benefit of themselves and their customers. We'll keep feeding our experiences and findings into the CIDA groups' work so that it is constantly honed and kept relevant. And effective!
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