The Innovation Gap

When you look at how fast things are changing in today’s world, it becomes clear most organizations need a constant flow of innovation. However, as we talk with executives in various organizations, we find that many find it difficult to devote as much focus to innovation as they think they need.  This innovation gap represents an increasingly important gap as the rate of change creates a more acute need to rapidly innovate on demand.

So why is it so tough to innovate continuously?

Several reasons! To start with, innovation may be high in importance but low in urgency. So often, it gets starved for time. Secondly, innovation requires the right kind of people who are passionate about it. Even if you identify these people, they might be sitting in different offices all around the globe. Some might not even be working for your company; they might be customers, suppliers or other external stakeholders. Modern innovation methodologies, such as Design Thinking and Lean Startup help make the process systematic and efficient. However, these generally assume teams are at one location, have enough bandwidth and a good understanding of these methodologies. In reality, this rarely happens.

Solution: Community-Sourced Virtual Garage

We think that a big part of the answer lines in concept, which our group in Accenture Labs call Community-Sourced Virtual Garage (CVG) teams. The idea is to use online labor markets to quickly create teams of skilled employees and external participants regardless of geography, and enable them with a set of tools and procedures that support modern innovation methodologies without requiring co-location, continuous participation, or extensive training. The success of these teams is based on three key elements: the right passionate people, an innovation process adapted to their context, and the right collaborative-technology tools.

Tools for the Virtual Garage

Imagine a tool that can help you create a CVG team and help the remotely located teams execute the piece of innovation that they are working on. That’s exactly what the Accenture’s technology platform for the CVG does  It brings together a combination of home-grown and commercial technology to support several key functions:

1. First, it leverages online platforms, such Upwork and internal talent broker we’ve developed, to find, recruit, and select the right mix of passionate people for each garage project.
2. Then, it guides the facilitator, with enhanced execution plans containing clear goals, key tasks, milestones and visual examples of the outcome.
3. The Platform also helps in creating virtual workspaces using , Storyboard That, UXPIN and others for remotely located teams to communicate and collaborate through innovation sprints.

These innovation sprints span between a few days to a few weeks with specific stages in the conceptional phase of innovation. These start from discovery and diagnoses of the needs and pain points and go all the way to the final solution concept actualization and follow up evaluation with users.

And that’s not all! The platform even supports you through execution of the sprints. It provides AI assistants which guide you and your team in effectively conducting the activities of the sprint session. These AI assistants recommend sprint warmup, ideation and storyboarding exercises at the right moments during design sprint and propose solutions if you are stuck.

But how real is this?

Accenture Labs has successfully run several of these sprints on a varied set of innovation objective. Two of those sprints were:

1. A sprint on an exploring potential product capability, where a first-time project lead and her team redesigned the car seat experience, designing a prototype around trends in IoT, connected car, and autonomous driving

Figure 1: One of the proposed solution sketches from the “Car Seat of the Future” sprint

2. A sprint that focused on innovating around an internal process, where another first-time project lead worked with her community team to redesign a widely-used internal tool to improve the user experience to increase engagement and adoption.

Figure 2: Turning feedback into strategies to “Reimagine Accenture’s Bench”

Figure 3: Turning strategies into a set of solutions, a UI mockups, and stakeholder presentations

These sprints successfully used our platform’s toolkit and processes to quickly source and build their teams of cross country participants with the required skill and experience diversity, acclimate the team to the structured methodologies, and run through the entire innovation process with outputs necessary to take them to the next step, such as interactive mockups and storyboard sketches, PowerPoint presentations, and explainer videos.   Our methodology let each project lead complete the end to end process, with stakeholder praise, in less than two weeks total and a work week or less for the actual innovation process.

What is your “innovation reality”?

How does your company currently do innovation? Where would you want to see more innovation happen in your company? How could “continuous innovation at scale” change the face of your organization? How would passion driven innovation improve your corporate culture and employee morale? What would you do if you could be included in a design and innovation team around something you where passionate about where you work? What sorts of opportunities would you seize if you could quickly spin up an innovation team of your own?

Let me know in the comments below!