4. The Process: Managing a Promising Idea Flashcards
Model to structure innovation process
-Activities: Information gathering (problem solving / knowledge generation) → input for gate decision
-Gate: go/kill decision point. Assessment of results and decision to invest more
Important factors:
-Continuous need to evaluate
-Clear gate criteria → comparison between projects possible, overview for top management
Critique of Stage Gate process:
Too determined, too slow for minor improvements, not suited for radical innovation, sequential
thinking, but innovation happens in trial and error-iterations
Principles of design thinking:
- Focus on users’ experiences, especially their emotional ones.
- Create models to examine complex problems.
- Use prototypes to explore potential solutions.
- Tolerate failure (an open culture).
- Exhibit thoughtful restraint.
- Experimentation and iterative problem-solving
Challenges of design thinking:
-Accepting more ambiguity: determine delivered value / ROI of creativity is impossible
-Embracing risk: There is no guarantee of the outcome of something new
-Resetting expectations: Design thinking helps to cut through complexity, but it’s not suitable for optimizing or operating a stable business
Perspectives of managing the innovation process:
-Stage-Gate process (deterministic, predictive, plan- oriented, linear, sequential)
-Agile development (experimental, adaptive, decentrally organized, autonomous, experience- oriented, function-oriented development)
Core principles of agile development:
-Integrate the customer or user, think in products, not projects. Team includes customer representative
-Agile work practices: Small teams, self-organization, new roles
-Commitment to common goal
-Work in small iterations and timeboxes, testing is a core activity of development
-Daily scrum everyones’ tasks from yesterday, today and roadblocks on the way
Objectives of agile development:
Ability to respond in an uncertain and turbulent environment. Flexibility, motivated teams, improved communication and knowledge transfer. Faster time to market and higher customer-centricity.
Lean Startup
-Minimum viable product (MVP): Maximal validated learning with minimal effort
-Split or A/B testing: Experiment by offering two versions
-Pivot: Structured course adjustment to test fundamental hypothesis on product or business model
-Build-Measure-Learn loop: Ideas → Build → Product → Measure → Data → Learn
Impact of agile development
Siege Zusammenfassung (PIEM Summary) Seite 6
Definition of Creativity (Amabile):
Creativity is the production of a novel and appropriate response, product, or solution to an open-ended task.
-task must be open-ended (heuristic), instead of having a single, analytical solution
-Response must be new, but not too different
-Response must be appropriate to the task (valuable, correct, feasible, fitting)
-Response is seen as creative by people familiar with the domain
Componential theory of creativity: everybody is creative to some extent, can be influenced by:
-Domain-relevant skills
-Creativity-relevant processes (cognitive and personality processes → novel thinking)
-Task motivation (intrinsic)
-Social environment
—-Block creativity: harshly criticizing new ideas, political problems in organization, emphasis on status quo
—-Stimulate creativity: collaborative, diverse, idea-focused work teams, encouragement of new ideas by
supervisors, appropriate recognition, sharing ideas across organization
Managers influence on creativity:
Resource, management practices, organizational motivation
