Welcome to a day-long workshop designed to help drive innovation across all areas of the Danfoss workforce.
This workshop kicks off a year-long project run by a team of innovation consultants from Florida State University. Over the course of the next year the team will be interacting with Danfoss employees with the intent of studying the Innovation landscape and developing a playbook for accelerating innovation within the Danfoss Workforce.
Project kick-off will take place at the annual Strategic Alignment Summit. Once kicked off, the team will follow up quarterly with an “innovation refresh” driving progress in four phases.
Phase 1 will consist of ethnographic research in which the team will interview select Danfoss leaders and employees to learn about the current culture of innovation and gain an understanding of the design and development process concluding with a summary report of the current culture of innovation at Danfoss.
Phase 2 will include a Design Sprint and ideation session with key opinion leaders within Danfoss to quickly generate ideas for promoting innovation within the workforce.
Phase 3 will deliver an innovation and intrapreneurship playbook that indexes the ideas developed through the Design Sprint combined with standard practices of Design Thinking and other established frameworks for innovation, along with unique ideas from the team.
Phase 4 will pilot one to three key ideas from the previous stages with select leaders and employees, with further work on finalizing the playbook and producing a final report.
FSU Innovation Consultants and Facilitators:
Ken Baldauf, Director, Innovation Hub at Florida State University
Dr. Emily Pritchard, Faculty, College of Medicine and Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship and Director, FSU-Mayo Clinic Collaboration, Office of the President at Florida State University
Dr. Mark McNees, Founding Faculty, Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneur in Residence at Florida State University
Dr. Darren Brooks, Assistant Chair, Department of Management, and Executive Director, Center for Human Resource Management in the College of Business at Florida State University
Workshop Goals
Acquaint all participants with the Design Thinking process and tools for innovation
Gain new insights and possible solutions to challenges in our industry
Get better acquainted with colleagues and build community within the organization
Agenda
8:00 Welcome, Introductions, Overview
8:30 Design Thinking Overview, Video, Challenge Reveal
9:00 Planning and Empathy Overview, Strength-finding Team-building
9:20 Short Break (as needed)
9:30 One-on-one Interviews
9:45 Affinity Map, Synthesize Insights
10:15 How Might We….?
10:30 HMW Sharing
11:00 Ideation Overview, Video, Brainstorming
Noon Lunch Break
12:30 Prototyping Overview, video, Storyboarding
1:00 Pitches
1:45 Reflection and Wrap
Introduction
Design Challenge
HOW MIGHT WE sustain and elevate our founder’s innovative spirit in a time of sustained growth, new market opportunities, in an environment of advancing competition?
Empathy Stage
Empathizing with the people experiencing the problem, and researching the relevant details. NOT thinking about solutions!
Ethnographic research involves observing issues from the point of view of the subject of the study. Methods include interviews, observation, role-taking, desk research, surveys and focus groups.
Activity 1a - Building Teams that Innovate
Activity 1b - Colleague Interviews
Pair up for interviews with the purpose of learning about the person you are interviewing and their views and experiences around the problem. Each person will take turns playing the part of the interviewer, five minute each. Approach the interview with the mind of a beginner, setting aside pre-conceived notions, and pretending to know nothing about the problem. Use post-its to note facts and insights relevant to the problem. Begin with the interviewee’s name (post-it #1), followed by insight about the interviewee’s personality, one per post-it. Set those aside, and start asking questions about the interviewee’s experience and insight regarding the design problem. After both people have served as interviewer and interviewee, if time allows, spend two minutes each asking deeper follow-up questions based on insights you gained.
Activity 2 - Affinity Map
Pairs combine into groups of four (or three or five) and gather around a white board. Each person introduce the person you interviewed - sticking the intro post-its at the top of the board. Then begin sharing the insights you gained by sticking them on the board one at a time. As group members see correlation with their own insights, they should share their ideas sticking the post-it along side the one it is related to. As all members share their insights in a free form manner, clusters of post-its should begin to emerge on the board. When all post-its are on the board, circle and label the clusters. It is normal to have a few outliers. Those outliers might be the most significant insights! One’s that no one has ever considered. They might serve to unlock new and unique solutions later in the process.
Synthesize and Share
Groups take 10 minutes to decide on their most valuable insights in terms of potential for impact, also their most unique insights.
(Re)framing Stage
In this stage you synthesize the results of your empathy research, decide on a specific problem within the main problem domain, and compose a descriptive How Might We (HMW) question.
Activity 3 - (Re)frame
Considers the insights you have gained so far through empathy research, interviews, affinity map, persona, and compliment that research with additional online research, phone calls, whatever is needed to answer any remaining questions or points of confusion. Once your research is complete consider key insights that you might like to address with your solution. Seek the unusual and unique - insights that no one has considered before. Each group member write a How-Might-We statement. Once everyone has an HMW, share them with the group. As a group decide on one that you would like to work on. If there is a difference of opinion utilize dot voting to choose one. Compose a (re)framed problem statement in the form of an HMW.
How might we help ___________, to ___________, so that ___________.
Sharing and Supporting
Each group shares their HMW question with all groups for support and feedback.
Ideation
From problem space to solution space! In the ideation stage we use divergent thinking to explore all possible and even impossible solutions seeking always to escape our pre-programmed thinking patterns to find solutions that are new, unique and impactful. Often times outlandish, impossible ideas spark creative ideas that are “just crazy enough to work.”
Activity 4: DT Brainstorming with Affinity Map
In Design Thinking Brainstorming we combine independent brainstorming with group brainstorming in order to access every idea for a solution from every group member. Take five minutes of silence at the table, for each group member to generate as many ideas on post-its as possible. Go for quantity over quality. Spend the next 20 minutes sharing your ideas with the group by placing the post-its on a white board area, finding commonalities, cluster post-its, circle and label to see where group ideas align (as you did for insights in Activity 2). There is no bad idea. Build on each other’s ideas.
Activity 5: Think Wrong
In his book “Think Wrong,” John Bielenberg and his team share dozens of methods to help innovators come up with new ideas. One method utilizes random words to seed fresh ideas. Use the random word generator at www.randomwordgenerator.com to generate three random words. Consider the words separately and in various combinations to play with word associations that lead to new ideas for solution to your design problem. For example, when working to assist returning citizens (ex-prisoners) in finding gainful employment, the randomly produced words “victory, ego, and wrong,” might lead one to think of a wrong victory, which might lead to thinking about the false assumptions that prisoners have about returning to society which might lead to the production of board game that produces informative “correct victories” to properly prepare prisoners for life outside the walls. See how many new post-its you can generate with three random words.
Activity 7 - Idea Filtering
It’s time to determine which of your ideas to start prototyping. Review all of your post-its and decide on your top three to five solutions based on impact and feasibility. Fill out an Idea Card for each of your top ideas. Map the Idea Cards on an Impact/Feasibility grid to determine which has the highest position. If there is no clear winner have each group member put a dot on the faces of each card to express how they feel about each idea. Whichever card has the most smiles and least frowns wins.
Activity 8 - Feedback Loop! (optional)
Have half the group stay at home base to pitch your solution, while the other half travels to the neighboring group to hear their pitch and provide feedback. The pitch should be uninterrupted and last three minutes. The feedback should also be uninterrupted for three minutes. Be sure to take notes on the feedback you receive. If there’s time, visit two groups! All teams return home and make final adjustments to your solution based on feedback and new inspiration.
Prototyping
In order to best communicate your brilliant solution to the world you must bring it out of your head and into the visible world as a prototype. Prototypes are born in simple, basic, form (low-fidelity) - where they can be critiqued fearlessly, and are iterated and refined to perfection.
Jake Knapp outlines the concept for Google’s protoyping concepts in his book “Sprint”.
Should we wait until ideas are perfected before showing them to the team, or even a customer?
There are four primary methods of prototyping:
Storyboard
Tell the story of your solution being implemented as a cartoon. Feature main actions on the part of the stakeholder, and emotional face expressions.
Physical Crafting
Using pipe-cleaners, construction paper, tape, and other crafting supplies build a simple model of your idea.
Paper Prototype (App)
Show the user experience of your app by drawing it screen by screen and demonstrating how a person would use it in a use case. Digital Prototyping with software like proto.io takes your app to the next level.
Act it out
Have the members of the group act out the use of your solution with each group member playing a role.
Activity 9 - Storyboarding!
Begin with a paper prototype.
Have ALL group members take 10 minutes to create their own individual storyboards using post-its for the image frames telling the story of your solution.
Once finished each member shares their prototype with your own group.
After all have talked through their prototypes, decide on the best one, or the best elements from all and create one final group storyboard.
Ken will take a photo of your storyboard to project during your presentation.
Rehearse your presentation. Include:
Your reframed problem statement (HMW)
Your solution
Your Storyboard
Presentations
Each group provides three minute presentation, beginning with their (re)framed HMW, and demonstrating their solution using their prototype. Two minutes will be provided for Q&A.