Feeling lost.

Identifying the problem

Great participation, enthusiasm, and drive of employees unfortunately started to wear wore off after beginning innovation projects. In researching their behavior, I found that they had little knowledge of and skills about innovation and design thinking, felt fear about pivoting the process and had low self-efficacy about applying these methods. This caused teams to fall in love with their solution rather than the problem. With my interaction designer lens, I also found that innovation processes were created in applications such as Word, Excel, and Azure. And by their design, how users interact with them, they can be quite cumbersome in restructure plannings when a team had to pivot.

Co-creating

The problem to solve became, “How can I make employees feel comfortable with the fluidity of an innovation process, inspired throughout, and fall in love with the problem rather than the solution?“. Is there something out there that could possibly do all of these things? That’s when I got the idea to connect with Studio Tast. They design tangible tools namely for the education context but I knew a specific one that could fit my needs if we could redesign it for the corporate context. This Tile Tool is all about the flexibility of a process and stimulating validation driven thinking by the way people interact with it. It outlines processes with big wooden tiles that are connected by smaller tiles, the activities. Studio Tast agreed to co-create and redesign their product through research and user testing. Now it was time to pitch to the DLL Innovation Board to get funding for this co-creation project.

Testing the digital prototype

Pitching to the Innovation Board was really exiting! …Would they grant budget for this out-of-the-box tool? Fortunately they did! Now, we could build prototypes of a digital version before producing the tangible one. I created prototypes in PowerPoint and Miro and facilitated user tests (remotely) with more that 100 employees were teams worked on their innovation projects and using the tool to structure their process. The user tests showed a playful and excited attitude towards the innovation process and a validation driven mindset. The employees used innovation terminology that they read from the tiles and got inspired to try out new actions. I was there to facilitate the conversation and clarify tiles when needed.

Testing the tangible prototype

After working with the digital prototype, Studio Tast and I defined the descriptions of the tiles. Then, the wooden pieces were produced and the tangible prototype, now called: Groow Business, was born! Testing the tangible version showed how it was even more intuitive than the digital one. I organized 2 test sessions with employees in Brazil and US and, even though it was a bit cumbersome for me to facilitate the user test remotely while teams were together in person, it still showed comfort in pivoting, a customer and validation driven process, and being inspired on the next steps.

The ups and downs, closure

The innovation mindset that is being trained through the Tile Tool/Groow Business, it’s tackling yet one of several factors that make it difficult to create a culture of innovation in a strongly regulated corporate setting. Seeing the bigger picture yet having to break it down into smaller pieces, felt frustrating at times. What else is needed, is endorsement from leaderships, especially when it comes to innovation practices as it’s so new and thereby a bit scary to the employees. The tool is slowly becoming part of existing innovation projects and is also driving new ones.

Studio Tast is now officially selling Groow Business and has recently launched their online platform, read more here.