Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Innovation
The Leading for Innovation set consists of the following modules:
You are in the Inquiry and reflection module
Inquiry and reflection
The big idea - from problem solving to discovery
The Discovery phase of the innovation cycle covers the steps we take to do research, gather insights and explore our findings - what we have summarised in the 'Inquire' and 'Reflect' stages here. The research we are talking about is not formal
academic research, instead it is a chance to uncover new insights into the issue we have chosen to look at.
The Discovery phase is about building new knowledge and generating new perspectives on the issue you have chosen. It helps to connect with potential users as real people with complex lives and understand what is really important to them. Please
note, the term 'user' here covers anyone you might want to benefit from your innovation - this could be colleagues, volunteers, service users, or even people who you want to target who are not yet using your services. One of the first
things you will need to decide for this challenge is who your user group is!
Discovery takes us outside traditional service boundaries to explore aspects of users’ lives that you might not already be familiar with. This helps to uncover new perspectives on the problems and opportunities you need to design for, and
it helps to challenge our assumptions as we get closer to the real issues.
Traditionally, we address service challenges like this….
In innovation approaches, our inquiry is more open…
In our Innovation Cycle model, the steps of Inquire and Reflect make up the Discovery phase. In our Inquire stage, we gather 'objective' and 'subjective' information of all kinds to help us build a 'rich picture' of what is going on in our
target arena. We can also look at inspiring examples of other services and systems, which helps to broaden our horizons of what might be possible. When we move to Reflect on the results of our inquiries, we produce ‘insights’ (more on
exactly what they are later) which are the fuel of any innovation process.
The richer the insights you can generate, the more powerful the rest of your innovation process will be.
Key outputs of the Discovery phase
The key outputs of the Discovery phase are:
- a new perspective on the issue
- key insights
- deeper understanding of your potential target users, colleagues or stakeholders
- inspiration examples of how your innovation could work
- desire to create new solutions to the problem.
Discovery skills
In this module we will help you understand the key skills and concepts which will help you build your inquiry and reflection approaches. We will take you through a series of steps to help you to:
- set the scope of your Discovery phase and create a high level 'research strategy'
- develop a 'Breakthrough Question' to guide your innovation process
- understand the difference between quantitative and qualitative research methods and give you a range of qualitative user research methods to try
- suggest ways of pulling your learning together in a way which will generate insights and point to new opportunities.
The discoverer's attitude
In the Discovery phases, our attitude to what we are doing is almost as important as the steps we need to take. If we go into Discovery:
- thinking we know the 'answer'
- assuming we know how other people see the issues
- trying to be efficient in getting to an end outcome
we are unlikely to be open enough to spot all the possible insights and opportunities that come towards us.
We need to have an attitude of exploration which emphasises:
- planning lightly
- letting go
- relaxing into it
- opening things up
- listening hard
- digging deeper.
Interestingly it can be more difficult to find this attitude if you have managerial accountability for the area you have chosen to work on. Accountabilities can drive us towards efficiency, tight definitions and 'controlling the outcome'.
If you have chosen your innovation challenge as something that you are formally responsible for, you will need to be extra attentive to your Discovery attitude!
The rest of this module will take you through the Inquiry and Reflect stages in more depth and offer a variety of methods that you can use to learn more about your innovation challenge.
Continue to: Gathering data
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