Brainzooming Innovation Process

Ready to accelerate innovation at your organization?

Leaders who want a collaborative, innovative culture must realize that it goes way beyond installing suggestion boxes. It takes a collaborative, strategy that touches every part of an organization.

Brainzooming is always honored when we’re asked to catalyze an organization’s innovative culture. We  accomplish it through dramatically expanding diverse thinking and collaboration via:

• Putting innovation within reach of everyone to contribute their insights and ideas
• Introducing productive structures and focused exploration to catalyze fresh thinking
• Using our Design-Engage-Launch process to target our process to your aspirations

Opening the Door to Broad Engagement

Brainzooming defines innovation simply: Innovation is anything that makes a fundamental, valuable improvement in the status quo.

This definition isn’t sexy. It opens an important door, though, for encouraging an innovative workplace culture. This approachable definition frees internal and external audiences to share:

• Insights that point toward improvements
• Perceived opportunities and challenges
• Ideas and solutions to create breakthroughs

Five Keys for Accelerating Innovation 

Our approach for accelerating innovation centers on five strategies:

1. Engage More and Diverse People – Brainzooming leads clients toward engaging diverse voices and perspectives. We support them in employing their natural thinking styles, irrespective of whether they are participating in-person or online.
2. Generate Abundant Possibilities – Innovation is a numbers game. At the start, every idea shared is good; near the end, only a few concepts advance for further development. Reaching the needed number of concepts depends on using multiple, varied exercises and simultaneous activities. These enable efficiently generating many ideas for every one that moves to implementation.
3. Target Thinking – People say that starting with a clean sheet of paper is best for brainstorming ideas; that’s untrue. Imagining more ideas at an accelerated pace benefits tremendously from working toward a specific objective.
4. Disrupt Familiar Thinking in Structured Ways – Productive thinking structures fuel imagining and sharing ideas. This is especially true for new participants to innovation. Analogies, extreme possibilities, rule and convention breaking, benefit-based exploration, and focused thinking provide different innovation perspectives.
5. Foster Productive Collaboration – We select creative thinking exercises and manage group dynamics to deliver the targeted range of ideas and concepts. Throughout a collaboration, we adjust small groups and thinking perspectives to stimulate fresh ideas.

Customizing Innovation for Your Organization

Brainzooming adapts our Design – Engage - Launch approach to customize our process and guide your organization in shaping and implementing a collaborative innovation strategy that matches your strategic aspirations.

Design

During this initial phase, we customize the activities that foster identifying breakthrough ideas and actionable innovation. We collaborate with from the start to design an innovation initiative that:

• Maximizes upfront insights
• Engages team members’ imaginations
• Integrates the work into actionable, ROI-creating implementation plans

Based on your timeline, participant locations, and your upfront exploration, we’ll design engaging collaborations that realize your desired innovation results.

Engage

Implementing the Design strategy, we select collaboration formats that best fit your objectives and engage audiences:

• Open-ended surveys capture early thinking from a wide, diverse audience
• In-person, collaborative events quickly move from creative thinking to innovative concepts and mini-plans
• Online collaboration via our Blast! platform engages dispersed audiences to generate ideas with outrageously productivity

Our multi-format capability fosters high-performing, successful innovation engagement from everyone. During the Engage phase, we accelerate innovative thinking through:

• Removing cumbersome steps
• Managing the experience to create a lively pace
• Employing small groups (and online collaboration) to include more people during innovative thinking
• Using unexpected questions to introduce new thinking perspectives
• Documenting all the input so it flows directly into next steps

Participants develop documented concepts from all prioritized ideas. This supports a seamless transition into the Launch phase.

Launch

It’s essential to move from innovative ideas to implementation. It starts during the Design and Engage phases; there, we adapt our innovation process with the end result in mind.

During the Launch phase, we finalize your innovation roadmap. The roadmap collects the insights and ideas from the first two phases to develop an implementation-oriented plan. It includes:

• Vision - Foundational statements, strategies, and guides for current and future innovation
• Insights - Facts and business conclusions underpinning the innovation strategy
• Ideas - A prioritized listing of ideas emerging from innovation collaborations
• Concepts - One or more related ideas described in greater depth, with expected benefits, applications, and next steps
• Implementation Plans - Key steps to launch an innovation initiative plus suggested timing and responsible parties 
• Support Tools - Decision support resources to prioritize and implement ongoing innovation initiatives

This forward-looking plan focuses your team on activating the people, tactics, and timing to ensure innovation pilots start well and stay on track. In all, the impact of customizing the three phases delivers a strategic innovation direction and the concrete steps to turn ideas into reality. 

The Best Environments for Collaborative Innovation

The Brainzooming innovation process creates impact for client organizations with a variety of innovation cultures:

• Smart, experienced teams who foresee looming market disruption
• Prolonged success that have become over-dependent on safe thinking, avoiding innovation and smart risk-taking
• A gap in introducing dynamic external perspectives to catalyze innovation
• Ongoing struggles to implement strong ideas beyond early development stages

Each of these situations, despite apparent challenges, demonstrates a vibrant core of insight and interest in innovative thinking. Coupled with leaders seeking positive change and wanting to engage diverse audience for new thinking, the stage is set for successful collaborative innovation.