Three learning objectives for this module on Generate. First we want to understand generate and its role in innovation within companies. Secondly, we want to practice using generating tools to help improve your innovation skills. And lastly, we want to use generate to create the cadence of innovation from everywhere and everyone Second platform in the innovation universe is generate. Generate is the center of the innovation universe and the most well known of the four platforms. When you read a book, attend a workshop or a conference or catch up on the latest innovation blog, you're most likely experiencing innovation at the Generate platform.

Remember, I told you earlier that generate is the sexy platform. Everyone gravitates toward generate because at its heart is the Big Bang of innovation, its creation itself. But in the innovation universe series, I want you to take away Generate is more than just creating innovations generates focus is on customer driven problem solving. A few years ago, I read this article by Heifetz. And Laurie the citation is shown here. And it changed the way I think about innovation.

Now, I highly suggest you read it as I won't do it justice here, but it will give you the essence of the work. The article suggests that there are two types of problems technical and adaptive and both are can be very difficult to solve. technical problems are easily defined. They have a proven solution, and they can be resolved using standard operating procedures. For example, many engineering problems are technical. There's a set of standards that engineers use to solve them.

It doesn't mean they're easy, but there are technical problems. But then there are downs. problems and adaptive problems are hard to define. There are no clear solutions, and they are new to the world. Now what this article made me realize that innovation is first and foremost an adaptive problem to be solved. Although you probably will use technical and adaptive methodologies along the way, overall, it's an adaptive problem.

Now, the second thing to think about is innovation is also about solving problems for your customer. So these adaptive problems are problems that your customers have. And if you're not solving customer problems, then you need to step back and question really what you're doing and innovation. I still work with a lot of companies who don't have the customer, their customer at the center of their work. So for these two reasons, the adaptive problem solving and putting the customer at the center, I tagged generate as the customer Driven problem solving platform. You know, I often think that generate holds the Big Bang for innovation.

It's where we go to create and test our abilities. And there's nothing quite like innovation. Now, think about all these initiatives we've had over the decades in companies. There are about zero variance and process improvement, and making sure things are risk and variance free. It's It's about taking things and studying them down to their smallest part, and then improving them. It's kind of like looking through a microscope.

And don't get me wrong. That deductive process is still critical in companies. But that starts with something that's already there something that exists and begins to make it better. And then along comes innovation. And it's the opposite of that. It's a telescope.

Innovation is about The biggest idea you can create the most unique idea the thing that has never been tried before that's new to the world. You know, it's no wonder that that's something that lives in the basement of our headquarters that I talked about earlier, whose job it is to protect the company begins to try to shut down innovation, and is working diligently to do so. Because innovation in some sense, is the polar opposite of what companies used to stand for. You know, people often ask me, what is the biggest learning or lesson from the decades of work that I've had an innovation? You know, it's kind of simple. The biggest lesson that I've learned of innovation in a company is that people are not the problem.

If you hang out your innovation, shingle. innovators will come and it's a turns out a lot of us, all of us, but a lot of us like telescoped better than microscopes. And I believe this is because there's something deep within many of us that wants to create and learn. It's, it's in our DNA. It's, it's like our personal Big Bang. And unfortunately, in our day to day lives, both at work and at home, most of us really get to unleash our creative inner selves.

And we bring, we actually keep that big bang closed off within us in order to survive day to day. I mean, let's face it before innovation, companies didn't want us to bring that part to work. They wanted us to bring compliance and repeatability and zero risk and standard operating procedures, adherence and cost reduction and basically just following orders and staying in your box, and then enter innovation and it's it's like a brave new world. It's the big bang in the innovation universe. It's the heart Part of generate, and it's where creativity and testing your skills get you excited to come to work every day. There are four elements that I want to cover in the Generate platform.

And these elements are the ones that are top of mind and the ones that I believe companies should pay attention to even companies that already have an innovation practice in place. The four elements are a unifying innovation process, innovation, mentors, ecosystems, and I pipe and metrics. So let's start with the unifying innovation process. Before I go into a deep dive of these four elements of generate, I want to talk a little bit about innovation programs, especially the one that that I've been associated With the University of Notre Dame, so full disclosure, I'm still associated with this program and with many programs at the University of Notre Dame several years ago, three entities came together and created a series of educational experiences for innovation practitioners now those entities work Whirlpool Corporation, beacon health system, and the Executive Education Department at the Mendoza business school at the University of Notre Dame.

So many of the topics that I'm going to talk about in this generate section come from the work that was created at the University of Notre Dame with this partnership with Whirlpool and with beacon. So here's a link for the certified for K certified I mentor program or we call it ci NP at Notre Dame. There are many other offerings there as well, but you can go if you want to learn more. It's an excellent place to go learn these skills and tools that I'm talking About and to put them into practice in real life on projects, both that we give you in the program, but also that you bring with you from your company. So the first element in generate is the unifying process. And that's a process that your company will use to teach and practice innovation.

Now, the first thing I should say is don't be turned off by the word process. It kind of gets a bad rap in companies because it tends to be cumbersome and bureaucratic. But when you think about it, you need a vehicle on teams of people come together, so that they can share a common set of steps and language and so you can make the process as light as you need to. The one process that I'm going to show here has been adapted from the unifying innovation methodology that you'll find in the Notre Dame program. The CIA MP program I talked about And it's used here with their permission. So the first decision your company will need to make is whether or not you want a unifying process for innovation.

And if you do, I suggest something like the one that you see here. This one, again adapted from the Notre Dame unifying innovation methodology is based on looking at hundreds of innovation processes around the world and realizing that they're all trying to do roughly the same thing. They just have different languages and nuances and they're branded differently. So I use the one here as a teaching tool to help you understand what should be in your innovation process and what the innovation process should be doing. There are many benefits to having a unifying process, one process that's used throughout the company. They include common language across your company, a common tool that everyone can learn Easily a way that you can roll up results into metrics, and a quick learning curve for new innovators as they come into the process.

So let's quickly take a look at the unifying process step by step. Okay, let's look deeper at frame and we're going to start with a unifying process. But before we do, as we go through this series of steps on the unifying process, there are some common district descriptors that we'll carry out throughout that I'd like to point out and they are, each stage will talk about the focus the inputs, the activities, and the output. So now let's look at the first stage and the first stage is frame. Now, this may be a little bit confusing, but this frame is different than the frame platform that we talked about in the innovation universe. Let's call that one as you see on this Venn diagram on the left.

That's the big frame that's associated with the company mandate. for innovation, the one we're getting ready to talk about is on the right hand side. And that's the let's call it the small frame. And this is how your team is going to frame the idea that you're getting ready to work on the innovation that you're getting ready to try. Now, of course, there's overlap, you know, they should all come from the same source. These are two different levels of framing, if you will.

Now, let's look at this frame this little frame for your innovation project. Now, you can make this step as detailed as you'd like or as light as you like. But remember and folk notice the focus here is to gain leadership alignment. You know, if you were inventing whatever idea you had in your garage, using your own money and resources, and assets, then this step wouldn't be required, but in a company, it's vital. It's vital to do this, the input For the steps comes from the strategic mandate, the big frame that we discussed earlier. Now the kinds of activities that you'll go through here is, you'll do some analysis on your idea, you'll begin to frame the problem, kind of sketch it out a little more, scope it out more, you'll begin to secure just enough resources to get started.

And then you'll be aligning stakeholders. The output here as a project charter won't be very detailed yet because you don't have a lot of detail, but enough to get the kind of resources you need. And the nod if you will the approval to go ahead. Now one other note, most innovation processes don't have frame included and that's why I Shrunk this size down a little bit just you could see it's a little different than the actual innovation steps. But in a company This step is vital and that's why I added it. One reason I like this process that you're looking at is that discover and Id eight are separated.

Many companies lump them together, discover is going to help you break frame, it's going to help you to think about your idea in the biggest light possible. It's going to force you to explore the bigger space around it. The input is from frame and it's your charter. And the activities here are to get deeper and broader customer immersion, to enlarge your point of view, to use design thinking or lenses or other tools to begin to discover how the problem might be solved. For example, let's say you're thinking about creating a new blender. The broader space around that Blender might include new technologies that are out there that no one has applied to blending yet that might be applied.

Maybe family food preparation, trends that are coming that are new to the world. Maybe competitive insights, cooking trends, analog To blending predictions about the blender market five to 10 years from now, maybe orthodoxies that your company holds about blenders that may get in the way, or maybe assets that your company has that have not been brought to bear on the spaceship, such as naming a few. You know, what's really happening in discover is that it's forcing teams to suspend the tendency to solve the problem too soon, it forces us to look much bigger at the problem around the problem and using deeper research and more customer insight. And all of this, it's kind of natural to fight against because we get in there, we want to solve the problem. But solving the problem too soon is one of the top failure modes of innovation teams. and discover keeps you from doing that too soon.

It says let's just look at a little bit bigger at the world and then we'll come back and see if your idea is if you're still thinking about it in the same And I guarantee you won't be after you go through discover. Now the output here is not yet an innovation, but rather its conceptual findings. It's insights that come from these broader spaces that you're exploring. So please try to see discover as a separate stage. You know, many companies that I work with that are stuck in innovation in a rut or are having trouble finding new ideas that are new to the world. They're kind of maybe in a continuous improvement rock.

And sometimes that's because they don't go through the discovery phase. Sometimes it's because they want to jump to the solution or they don't want to take the time. But this discovery stage is critically important if you want to create new to the world innovations. Okay, we've looked at frame and discover. And now we're going to look at ideate. Now remember, in some processes ideate and discover are together.

And my suggestion is that you separate them so that you can really get the benefit from each of these steps. Now, ideate takes these conceptual findings that come out of discover just individual, maybe thousands and thousands of insights and begins to go through a creative grouping, to group them into what we call business concepts. So what your treat team is trying to do here is trying to conceive new solutions to the problem you identified. So you're now moving into that solution phase. And we usually do this face through a series of what we call innovation labs or AI labs, where we get groups of people together, to look at all those insights and begin to merge them into concepts, business concepts. So the essence of this phase is to look for intersection of disparate things.

Now remember, innovation happens at the intersection of things that don't normally go together. So teams of innovators both inside and outside the company will begin to bundle findings from the Discover phase, using activities like diverge, converge, or identifying opportunities, building concepts, and then beginning a prioritization step to figure out what business concepts they want to move forward. The outcome for ID eight is a preliminary set of prioritized concepts or prototypes that your innovation team believes will present new, viable solutions to the problem you're trying to solve. Okay, we're down to the fourth stage, and that stage is elaborate. Now, this stage isn't always called elaborate, but I think it's a good descriptor because in this stage, what you're going to do is you're going to take the preliminary concepts that came out of the ideation phase and begin to prototype and conduct experiments in the market with consumers to see if there's a well innovation we'd like to say if there's a there there, if there's something there that really is viable for both the consumer to create value and for your company to create value.

And so the focus here is to create viable offerings. The kind of activities are creating and conducting experiments, expanding concepts, and beginning to develop the business plan and the business process. The output for this stage is the go to market plan. Okay, we're down to the last stage and that stage in the unifying process is called launch. Now the launch stage is where you are Align shareholders both inside and outside creating innovations and actually launching them into the marketplace is incredibly hard. So paying attention to the launch phase is very important.

This is where you will deploy your launch plan. You're also concerned with the innovations performance in the marketplace through post launch. So you're not just going to launch and walk away, you're going to keep watching it and checking it and going through different iterations and adapting it. Your goal here is to keep it innovative and in the market for as long as possible. So you're going to look at maybe different pricing or point of sale or channel iterations and you're going to be using some of these innovation tools post launch. You'll also be tracking and reporting how the innovation is performing.

Now the outcome here is value capture. This is the end this is where you decide if you really have something or consumers willing to pay and pay more because they're getting a greater value, because you've brought an innovation that solves their problem in a unique way. Now, we went through the stages in this model very quickly. In real life. Some of these stages will take your teams months or even years depending on the type of innovation. But the takeaway I'd like you to think about for this section is to select an innovation process that best suits your company's needs.

And that may mean taking a few of them and fusing them together to create a unique process. This unifying process that I showed you, I hope it helps you understand at a high level the steps that whatever process you choose, you need for innovation teams to go through so that they can achieve success in the marketplace. Also think about each of these stages will have a myriad of tools and approaches attached to them. lots of choices that you can make along the way In each section, I'm going to give you a chance to practice one aspect of that section or element. And we're going to do this using an MVA a minimal viable approach. It's generally a tool, it could be a set of questions or things to have you think about.

But it's something that I selected that exemplifies this element that we're in. And it's basic and simple. So it's something that you can do quickly. And then you can decide which areas you want to spend more time on afterwards and bring in any of the hundreds of tools that might be out there, that might help solve the problem in a different way for you. So for now, let's just keep it simple. And let's practice with one tool, and we're going to call that the MVA.

We've come to the part of the section where I'd like you to practice using one of the tools. Remember, this is what we call the end Va the minimal viable approach. In this case, I'm going to go back to the frame stage in the unifying process and pick a tool from that very first stage. And the tool I'm going to choose is the innovation project plan or project charter. Now, you may in your company, have a project planning methodology and have a charter that you use already. This is just one version of a project plan.

And I like it because it's all on one page. Let me just go through it at a really high level. First of all, what is the innovation working name and give one sense description of the innovation. If you have an owner or team leader, a sponsor and even team members, add them and then one paragraph short paragraph or sentence on the objective. For the innovation a picture a graphic is always helpful. So something that represents the innovation.

And then as you go down, what are the opportunities or the problems you're trying to solve? What's the strategic rationale? Who's the target customer, at least as you know it now? What's a execution plan? Just sort of big chunks of how you might approach this because again, you're at the very beginning stages. How might you resource it?

And then if you know, expected results, and importantly, who are the stakeholders inside the company that may need to be involved in the process in the innovation so that's what the tool looks like at a very high level. Now, what I'd like you to do is take the tool, this innovation project plan and either retro actively apply it to an innovation that you were part of, or maybe even better go out into your company and find an innovation team that's presently Working and collaborate with them to fill out this project plan. And I think what you'll see, as we've seen in all the tools is the real value isn't necessarily the output that's on the page. The real value is the discussion and the alignment that happens behind the scene. So as we've done before, I just like you to pause the module and complete and at least experience this innovation project plan and then come back and we'll keep going in the Generate platform.

Okay, we just finished the first element in generate in Part B. In the next module, we'll look at the other three elements they are I mentors, ecosystem, and I pipe in metrics