We need a winning idea... now!
Have you, or your team, ever been tasked with coming up with a disruptive idea that will take your charity in new and exciting directions?
Our clients are facing these challenges more and more. They can be under pressure to develop winning ideas that will deliver value for their organisation as well as their service users.
In the not-for-profit sector, it's important to know how to innovate with purpose, to leverage your skills and strengths in line with your values. And, it's important to know how to develop ideas in a way that manages risk and delivers exciting results.
On a design sprint, the aim is to create business value quickly by tackling a specific business problem or validating an idea through focused prototyping and user testing over the course of a week. But what if you haven’t defined your business problem clearly? Sometimes clients come to us with very broad challenges - and these are tough briefs for a design sprint team!
We recently did a Design Sprint with Barnardo's, who have an in-house innovation team tasked with developing disruptive new income streams for the organisation.
It was clear that their opportunity space, while exciting, was broad and relatively unexplored. This increased the risk of a Design Sprint not tackling the right problem and, ultimately, developing an idea that wouldn't provide value to Barnardo's or their service users.
In order to define a focused challenge for Barnardo's, we ran a series of activities before starting our Design Sprint:
- Landscape analysis to uncover competitor offerings and financial models.
- Value proposition workshop to uncover business and user needs, followed by an ideation session to translate these into products and features that would minimise pains and create gains.
- Value proposition statements to pin-point our offering, our target market and point of differentiation.
- Design Sprint brief to define and agree on the challenge, key research questions, deliverables and participants.
These are just a few of the activities we use in our innovation work to help clients develop exciting design challenges and be better prepared for a design sprint.
I get really excited about helping organisations develop ideas that create a positive impact on the world, particularly if it also helps them develop new revenue streams in line with their brand beliefs.
Get in touch if you'd like to know more about hosting an innovation workshop to help define your next big idea?
