Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Innovation
Ideation and creativity
Sharing your innovation ideas: Compelling messages for engaging others
So you're probably now ready to think about the next stages of your innovation cycle, moving towards experimenting and learning from your experience. But this is also the point where you might need to engage other people in your breakthrough
ideas. You may need to bring other people into your 'story' to help you:
- prototype and test ideas
- gain organization momentum for your innovation process
- gain user support and enthusiasm for your new approach.
The value of storytelling
Good storytelling is vital to helping your idea to grow. You might have the most brilliant idea, but if you can’t get anyone else excited about it then it’s probably not going to happen…
For a story to be really effective it needs to appeal to its audience on at least three different levels:
- It must connect emotionally. For colleagues, that might be about leaving them with the feeling that this is a really important issue and there must be something done about it. For users, it might be more about feeling that ‘this
service is going to help me with something that’s really important to me’. Or, ‘people like me have benefitted from this service, so I can imagine benefitting too.’
- It must connect practically. Colleagues must think, ‘yes, I can see how this is going to work and create the impact they are claiming’. Potential users must be able to imagine how it is going to fit into their lives on a practical
level.
- It must connect financially. Colleagues must believe this service offers good value for money. Potential users must think what the service offers is worth investing whatever money or time that is required of them to participate.
The shape of a good 'pitch'
When you’re pitching your ideas to other people, you need to include all of these elements.
- An emotional journey that makes people care – what is the problem you are trying to solve?
- An invitation to suspend disbelief and enter an alternative reality – what is your vision for how things could be different?
- A structure that connects where we are with where we’ve come from – what was your process that gives you confidence you have the right solution?
- A crafted system that helps people understand – what is your idea and how does it work?
Techniques for developing your story
Stakeholder mapping
You will need to make the case for your idea to a wide range of different people. Stakeholder mapping is a useful way of seeing who you need to engage all at the same time.
Once you have mapped the relevant stakeholders, you may want to select those key stakeholders and develop short profiles with their needs and perspectives detailed, so that you can craft your message specifically to them.
Storytelling workshops
Storytelling is going to be useful for all your audiences. Often powerful stories emerge from prototyping of what happens when a user benefits from a service. Solving a problem on a personal level is a good way to help people see the emotional
value of your idea.
Storyboarding
Storyboarding is another useful device for communicating ideas quickly and it goes into a little more detail than rapid sketching. Draw a comic strip with a series of windows, then in each window draw the key interactions or touchpoints
of your service. Write underneath what is happening at each stage. This method has the advantage of maintaining a user perspective on the idea.
Storyboards are also used in prototyping, where they tend to be more detailed and developed. During this initial communication phase, your storyboards can be simple and quick as a way of conveying your idea rapidly.
Visual methods for sharing your story
Bringing your idea to life visually can be the difference between mind-numbing PowerPoint and something everybody wants to be a part of. In the sections below you'll see some suggestions to help you communicate your idea visually.
We have created two templates to help you, one for sharing your Storyboard and another to help you think about how you can demonstrate User touchpoints.
Storyboard
You could refine the storyboard into a final version, that explains how your service works, as a comic strip.
Touchpoint mock-ups
Touchpoint mock-ups are another great way of bringing an idea to life by drawing some of the key points of contact for users of the service. For example, if your idea involves an online service, you could draw what you’d like the website to look like
and ask people to respond to that.
User stories
You could make a timeline of a real or imagined user that shows how using the service makes an impact on their lives.
Capability graphs
If your service is about building the capabilities of the users, you could create a scale to measure levels of capability and plot this over time.
Headline numbers
What are the numbers you want to shout about? It could be how many people you could help, how much money you could save, or what impact you expect to have.
Pause for reflection
Take a few moments to note down your 'first draft' of your innovation story.
Which aspects of your learning or your insights are most likely to connect emotionally with different types of audience? [Hint: It helps to list out your audiences and think about each one separately]
What details and aspects will you need to include so people can connect to it practically? [Again, you will need to consider different audiences here]
What kinds of data could you gather to support your financial story? [You can consider different types of 'financing' here including things like community assets, volunteer time, 'in kind' partner contributions etc.]
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