to get
innovation

you need  inspiration

Cross-pollinate

Tips & tricks

  1. Create a safe learning environment to stimulate and sustain openness and creativity.

  2. Start an open dialogue with and between key stakeholder partners to generate a list of shared business model elements that may help accomplish the shared vision and mission.

  3. Make a list of shared ideas for possible business model elements, together with your key stakeholder partners. Discuss both the value generating and value destroying potential of particular elements. Bring them to the surface and take them into account.

Tools

  • Use qualitative instead of financial selection criteria
    At this stage, you often lack sufficient data. Therefore you can't rely on traditional (mostly financial) criteria. Luckily there are seven other key criteria to assess innovative ideas: innovativeness, feasibility, scalability, economic profit, social profit, accord with the current group vision, accord with the vision of individual partners (especially the partners executing this phase). Other critical questions you can ask yourself: how will it improve functionality? How large and how ready is the market? What benefits will users see? How much will it leverage existing capabilities? And how much will it cost in terms of time and money?
  • GPS brainstorming kit
    Use the GPS brainstorming kit to structure brainstorming sessions with 12 to 15 participants. The goal is to allow ideas to bubble up, preferably as many as possible. Next, you can cluster and assess the best ones, and start from there to make more concrete plans. This step is all about brainstorming on the various components of your business model, but without wanting to connect them. Finding links and seeing the bigger picture is the next step. Get your own GPS brainstorming kit at Flanders DC.
  • SCIN Workshop
    Flanders In Shape has developed the SCIN workshop. SCIN stands for Stakeholder Centred Innovation Workshop. During the workshop, you visualize all stakeholders directly or indirectly involved in the product or service. In addition, you order them by priority. So you can see at a glance which stakeholders to involve in which steps of the design process.
  • Persona
    In everyday usage, the word 'persona' (plural personae or personas) refers to a social role or a character played by an actor. Yet in a business context too, you and your partners play different roles, each with their own legal attributes. It is important to see that these roles can sometimes even vary in one and the same context. Download a template for identifying personas.
  • Promises and Potential Map
    This exercise brings order in the chaos that typically results from the brainstorming phase. It orders ideas on two axes. The first axis ranks the offer: it ranges from close to the current offering to radically new and innovative offerings. The second axis contains the market perspective: it goes from ideas targeting current users to offerings for a completely new market segment. Download a template for this Promises and Potential Map.
  • Anchors
    Board of Innovation has proposed the Anchors exercise. What’s stopping us? What's holding us back from launching and sustaining innovations? Such discussions often turn to topics like internal culture, access to specific resources, or failed projects in the past. By having this discussion upfront, you (and your partners) will get a better view on the internal challenges that you need to address. After all, ideas will have to fit within the constraints of the existing corporate structure.
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