Immerse, Imagine, Invent, Articulate: A framework for disruptive innovation

Immerse, Imagine, Invent
& Articulate
A framework for disruptive innovation
Presented by Paul-Jervis Heath at UX Cambridge on Wednesday 4 September 2013.

MH ModernHuman.

Hello!
• I’m most at home in a design studio. I’ve spent 15 years designing
services and digital products for big, international clients and small,
disruptive start-ups.
• I’m Principal of a design practice and innovation consultancy called
Modern Human; I lead the team there. I’m also Head of Innovation at the
University, while we establish an innovation centre.
• We use human-centred design to help businesses invent their future.
We’ve worked in lots of diﬀerent sectors and done lots of diﬀerent
design projects such as in-car information systems, smart home
appliances, concepts for retail stores of the future, established an
innovation practice at University of Cambridge, and lots of other things.

Today’s workshop squeezes a week
of our innovation intensive course
into 3 hours.
Inevitably, we’ve left quite a lot out
but I hope today will give you some
useful skills to take back to work and
a taste of that course.
🕅🕆
Photo credit
Flickr user andreaskopp - http://bit.ly/12yywna

Standing out from the
crowd is never easy

Product Performance

Disruption

Time

Source:
The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen. (1997).

Disruptive thinking does
not rely on the invention of
disruptive technology.

Satisﬁed

t
en

Pe
r

fo
r

m
an

ce

m

e
cit
Ex

Low Investment

High Investment

Basic

Dissatisﬁed

Source:
Attractive quality and must-be quality - Journal of the Japanese Society for
Quality Control (in Japanese), Noriaki Kano, (1984)

The rate of adoption is accelerating

89
years

38
years

14
years

(Time to Reach 150 Million Users)

7

years

5

years

👥


Immerse

👥 📣

💡

Articulate

Imagine

🚀
👥

👥

Invent

🕅🕆
Entypo Pictograms
by Daniel Bruce - http://entypo.com.

Everyone can
use creative
techniques to
solve business
challenges.
🕅🕆
Photo credit
Flickr user asadotzler - http://bit.ly/15sTd0V

🕅🕆🕇🕊
Photo credit
Flickr user djking - http://bit.ly/13ObNXf

Focus groups are not
design research.

Usability testing is vital but it
will not uncover users’ needs.

What are we looking for?
• Workarounds: Quick, seemingly eﬃcient solutions that address the symptoms of
a problem not the root cause.
• Values: People’s values play an important role in their motivations. What do they
value? What’s important to them? What’s not?
• Inertia: Situations in which customers act out of habit. How can you leverage or
break that inertia?
• Shoulds vs. Wants: People struggle with the tension between wants: things they
crave in the moment; and shoulds: things they know are good for them in the
long term. How can you help people move from where they are to where they
want to be?

Early Adopter

Early Majority

Late Majority

Laggards

Adapted from:
Diﬀusion of Innovations, Everett M Rogers. (1962).
Crossing the Chasm, Geoﬀrey Moore. (1991).

What did you ﬁnd out?
• Close your laptop and revert to low-tech methods for analysis! It moves you out
of your own normal situation.
• Write each observation on a post-it note (get some rectangular post-its for this).
Print out all the photos you took.
• Build an insight board of all of the post-its and photos.
• Aﬃnity Sort: organise it into themes. Code your observations. This all lays the
groundwork for recognising insights.
• Observations are raw data. Insights are the interpretation of patterns in your
observations.

Look for the unexpected and ask, why?
• Don’t try and think about everything at once. Find a good place to start.
• Don’t focus on the obvious. There’s a risk that you just conﬁrm your own
preconceptions and prejudices.
• Start with unexpected observations.
• Why is this a pattern? Why is it unexpected? Why is it meaningful?

Insight: A common failure of cleaning
floors is not a lack of water but an excess
of water that causes water to slop dirt
around.
Cliché: People use mops with water to
clean floors
Hypothesis: What if mops did not use
water
Opportunity: Provide people at home
[who] with a faster way to clean floors
[advantage] without using water [gap].

🕅🕆🕇
Photo credit
Flickr user Chiot’s Run - http://bit.ly/16ZgcVw

Just your team?
• Recruit some users, or go out and ﬁnd them guerrilla style.
• Immerse yourselves: diary study, shadowing, contextual interviews.
• Analyse the ﬁndings; look for the opportunities.

… or, involving everyone.
• Train & Facilitate: Teach others how to be the researchers. Have them go
out and immerse themselves through contextual research. Work with
them to structure the study and get together to analyse the ﬁndings and
insights.
• Open: Ask people to submit their own observations and insights on a
challenge using an Open Innovation platform. At Modern Human use
our own platform to manage innovation challenges for our clients.

3 questions:
1. What do you want to disrupt?
2. What are the clichés?
3. What are your disruptive hypotheses?

Adapted from:
Disrupt: Think the unthinkable to spark transformation
in you business, 2010, Luke Williams.

What do you want to disrupt?
• How do you meaningfully diﬀerentiate this product or service from
everyone else in the same space?
• What situation are you going to challenge?
• For example,
-

This is an area where proﬁt performance is average – it really should be more successful than it is.

-

This is a category where growth is slow and everything seems the same.

-

It boils down to… “How can we disrupt the <category> by delivering an expected solution”

Adapted from:

Wii: How Nintendo
challenged everyone’s
perceptions of Video Games.
🕅🕆🕇🕋
Photo credit
Flickr user lincolnblues - http://bit.ly/1dC6LBm

Searching for clichés

📦  

Product

Interaction

Pricing

Adapted from:

Forming a disruptive hypothesis

🔄

Invert

Scale

Deny

Adapted from:

Source:

Let’s try it out.

🕔 30-mins

Open the brieﬁng pack, read the contents.

•
•

What disruptive intervention could you make?

•

How could you invert, deny or scale those clichés? Try inverting, denying or
scaling each of your clichés.

•

What would be your disruptive hypotheses? Identify the strongest 3 as your
disruptive hypothesis.

•

Tell us about it! Take the rest of the room through your thinking in a 5-minute
presentation.

What are the clichés in that industry, and about that experience? Generate 12-18
cliches about that experience.

Brainstorming gives
ideation a bad name.

Quantity of ideas
people come up with
in a brainstorm

x2

Quantity of
ideas people
come up when
working alone

Source:
Does Group Participation When Using Brainstorming Facilitate or Inhibit
Creative Thinking? Administrative Science Quarterly. Taylor, Berry & Block, 1958.

20%
Using traditional
brainstorming

more

Encouraged to
discuss and critique
each others ideas

Source:
The liberating role of conﬂict in group creativity: A study in two countries.
European Journal of Social Psychology, Nemeth et al, 2003

“ You can discover more about

a person in an hour of play
than in a year of conversation.”
– Plato: Greek Philosopher, Mathematician & Student Of Socrates

Rapid Ideation
What?

•

One reason teams end up with under-developed ideas is that we stick with the ﬁrst good idea we
have, rather than taking the time to explore complementary approaches.

•

This game combats that pattern by forcing us to generate lots of ideas in a short period of time.

•

Take 8 sticky notes

•

You have 5 minutes from when I say “go” to sketch 6 to 8 ideas.

•

We’ll play 4 rounds.

•

After each round I’ll ask you to present your ideas to the group very brieﬂy (2 minutes each).

•

The idea in each round is to either generate new ideas, build on your own ideas or build on ideas of other
people.
Source:
Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rulebreakers
and changemakers. 2010. Gray, Brown and Macanufo.

Quickly building on ideas
What?

•

In a space visible to the players, write the topic around which you need to generate
ideas and draw a quick sketch of it.

•
•
•

Take your set of index cards and silently write an idea on each card.

•

Continue this process of brain writing and passing cards to the right until there are
various ideas on each card.

Pass the ﬁrst of your ideas cards to the person on your right.
When you receive a card, read the card and think of it as an “idea stimulation” card.
Add an idea inspired by what they just read or to enhance the idea and then pass
again to their right.

Source:

Interesting Combinations of Attributes
Step 1:

•

As a team decide on two sets of attributes that deﬁne a matrix. E.g.

Source:

Interesting Combinations of Attributes
Step 2:

•

Populate the matrix creating a grid of possible new combinations

Step 3:

•

Do a quick sketch of each idea that comes out of those combinations.

Source:

When you get stuck, go in new directions

Force Connections

Blend ideas

Blend beneﬁts

Let’s do it.
•
•
•
•

🕔 30-mins

Use one or more of the ideation techniques we’ve discussed to create a concept.
Generate as many ideas as possible in 45-minutes.
Do not critique the ideas now.
Practice divergent thinking.

How? Now. Wow!
Original

Wow!

How?

Easy

Impossible

Now.
Conventional

Let’s try it.
•
•
•
•

🕔 15-mins

Use the How, Now, Wow matrix as a structure to critique your ideas.
Not all ideas have to go on the matrix, feel free to discard ideas at this stage.
This is the stage to critique your ideas.
Practice convergent thinking.

Just your team?
• Decide what you’re going to disrupt. Identify the clichés. Form your
disruptive hypotheses.
• Use the insight from research as stimulus to your ideation sessions.
• Divergent thinking is the key so run several rounds of an ideation game.
• Don’t give up until you’ve got more than 100 ideas.
• Rate the ideas, select the best.

or, involving everyone?
How many?
• 20-30: run a series of codesign workshops inviting people into the
studio to
• More than that: Run a large, open codesign workshop or idea jam (like a
hack day for ideas).
-

Hire a suitable space, invite lots of people, form them into teams and introduce the challenge brief then
let them go for it.

-

Divergent idea generation and convergent idea selection.

-

Discuss at half-way point. Pitch at the end.

Refine ideas into concepts
• What is the concept?
• Who is the primary end user?
• Why should they care? What are the benefits?
• How will this idea deliver those benefits?

Deﬁne your concept
Illustrate the concept through a combination of…
• storyboards that describes the concept
• diagrams explaining how it might work
• high-ﬁdelity mock-ups of the concept

Use this Slide to Make Bold Statements!
Early stage prototyping
provides validated learning.

Experimenting with prototypes.
• Use prototypes to learn about user behaviour with your concept
• Validates emergent service against business objectives and goals
• Validates Concepts with Users
• Use Scenario Testing, Concept Probes, Cognitive Walkthroughs with Real
Users, Mock environments, Roleplay.

Iterate and refine.
• Iteration is vital for success
• Treat the concept as a hypothesis not as a definitive solution
• Learn everything you can
• Adapt to what you learn
• Refine the concept, refine the prototype
• Test Again

Just your team?

✎

Illustrate

⟳
Refine

🎯

Test

• Facilitate: Do teams have time and skills to develop the concepts on
their own or with support from design practitioners?
• Dedicate the team: Can teams whose ideas show promise be given
dedicated time to incubate their ideas into concepts?
• Bring into a central team: Is it better to use a central design team to
develop the ideas into workable concepts?

Articulate the future state.
• Disruptive ideas can be hard for companies to adopt because they’re
disruptive – companies embrace disruptive ideas when they believe it
will deliver value.
• Identify and convince the stakeholders needed to take the solution to
the next level. Those who will allocate capital, technology and people.
• A longer pitch isn’t better. Constrain yourself to 9-minutes: 10 seconds to
grab their attention and 8min 50sec to hold it!
• Whether you use the structure on the next slide or not, it’s a useful
thought exercise.

Make them
believe

Build Tension

Create Empathy

Structure
The Status Quo

The Observations

The Story

The Insight

The Opportunity

The Analogy

Give them the turning point

Make it familiar

The Advantages

The Ethos

Make change appealing

Leave them on a high

Tell them what they don’t
know

The Solution

Just your team?
• Who are you pitching to? Find the right stakeholders and sponsors that
can make the concept happen.
• Pitch it. Support the pitch with concept material.

• Lead up to a pitch day.
• There has to be a serious commitment to adopt new ideas beforehand.
• Have designers to act as mentors and coaches.
• Have the challenge teams pitch their ideas to a panel of the business’
stakeholders and decision makers.
• Give teams the pitch structure to help them (they might not be
professional pitchers).
• Select the best ideas to develop further.

ModernHuman.
🕅🕆🕇🕊
We love our ideas to spread. That’s why this
presentation is released under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license.
This license allows you and others to remix,
tweak, and build upon this work noncommercially. When you do you must
acknowledge us, Modern Human and license
any new creations under the identical terms.
When in doubt, just ask us. We won’t bite.

We use human-centred design to help
businesses invent their future. We’re a
design practice & innovation consultancy.
Find out more at http://modernhuman.co
Paul-Jervis Heath
paul@modernhuman.co
@pauljervisheath

🕅🕆
Photo credit
Flickr user andreaskopp - http://bit.ly/12yywna

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