Before an innovation workshop, focus interviews on employees and customers who interact with the product daily, not just executives. Their ground-level insights are essential for defining the strategic 'white spaces' that will guide the workshop and ensure it addresses real problems.
The work that makes an innovation workshop successful happens before it starts. Before the session, assign a clear owner for the outputs and create a rubric for evaluating ideas. This structure ensures that promising concepts are systematically advanced for investment, rather than dying on a whiteboard photo.
Ensure the person who can ultimately approve funding for new initiatives is an active participant in the workshop. Their presence builds early buy-in and momentum, preventing promising ideas from being rejected later by a decision-maker who lacks context on their origin.
The make-or-break quality for a workshop facilitator is their energy level. A good rule of thumb is to be 30% more energetic than your normal state when leading a room. What feels exaggerated to you will come across as engaging and enthusiastic leadership to the participants.
To maximize contributions from introverted participants like engineers or scientists, provide a detailed pre-work packet with industry examples. This allows them to think deeply beforehand, arriving with dozens of well-formed ideas and making the session more productive from the start.
To break free from industry conventions, prompt teams to examine how unrelated industries have solved similar problems—like how thermostats evolved from simple dials to Nest. Posing questions like, "What if Apple designed our product?" can spur truly novel thinking.
When narrowing down ideas, replace generic dot-voting with prompts tied to strategic goals. Ask participants to vote based on criteria like "potential to generate X million in revenue" or "ability to increase customer retention." This ensures the winning ideas directly address core business objectives.
The impulse to "add AI" is common, but workshops exploring it must first ask "where do we have good, clean data?". Without a solid data foundation, AI ideation is futile. The first innovation step might be improving data collection, not implementing machine learning.
Inject fresh perspectives into an innovation session by bringing in "outside expert ideators" from unrelated fields. A toy innovator can challenge thinking on physical product design, while a professional illustrator can sketch concepts in real-time, making abstract ideas tangible and stimulating discussion.
Go beyond inviting your best customers to workshops. Intentionally include mid-tier or even dissatisfied customers. Giving them a forum to solve problems makes them feel heard, often turning them into loyal advocates, while providing the company with ideas grounded in real, urgent needs.