Driving Innovation By Ryan Russell

3 Things Organizations Must Do Now to Drive Innovation

Innovation is crucial for organizational success and longevity in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. Yet many companies find their efforts to foster Innovation falling short of expectations. Has your organization tried to be more innovative, only to have those efforts fail? Or perhaps you’re unsure where even to start?

Drawing from practices used by some of the world’s most innovative organizations, I want to share three proven approaches to driving innovative ideas and cultivating a culture of invention. When implemented consistently, these strategies can transform your organization’s thinking about and pursuing Innovation.

PROFOUND UNDERSTANDING

First, the foundation of Innovation is a profound understanding of those you serve. Whether you call them customers, members, partners, patrons, fans, or something else, gaining a deep insight into their wants, needs, and desires is crucial. Everything flows from this.

This effort provides much deeper insights than demographic information. To truly innovate, you should delve into your customers, dreams and fears. What do they love? What do they desire? Where are they trying to go? What frustrates them? Your organization needs to know the answers to solve problems and delight those you serve genuinely you serve.

Innovation should be a collective effort, and employees should be encouraged to continually improve their understanding of the customer. This deep, widespread understanding drives meaningful Innovation and fosters a culture of creativity.

How can you deeply understand those you serve? Here are a few practical ways to start:

Work the front lines. This activity lets you spend time with your customers directly. See them with your own eyes. Hear them with your ears. For example, if you own a grocery store, work checkout once every week. If your organization delivers things to customers, do deliveries for the day.
Listen to customer service calls. Require everyone in your organization to listen to calls on a fixed cadence—every month, quarter, or bi-annually. These calls let you hear the customer’s voice firsthand.
Read customer feedback in staff meetings. Review emails and social media posts from customers in weekly staff meetings. Don’t just focus on the positive feedback – include all types.
Conduct regular customer interviews. Sit down one-on-one with customers and ask them open-ended questions to gain deep insight.
Get fresh perspectives. If you are a church or an organization that runs events, ask someone who has never heard of the experience to attend and write down what they experience, see, hear, and feel. It will give you fresh, unbiased eyes on your organization’s offerings. You’ll likely be surprised by what you learn.

WORK OUTSIDE IN

Second, work outside in. When generating new ideas, concepts, and solutions, always start with what will delight customers. Never begin with internal business needs or new technology — that’s working inside out, and it rarely succeeds, though it happens all too often.

Instead, teams must start by envisioning what would be truly lovable for a customer. Define it clearly and rapidly bring it to life. This approach becomes your clear north-star vision. Only then can you figure out the path to get there:

How do you operationalize it?
What technology needs to be built or bought?
What business model best supports it?

At Compassion, we’re currently applying this approach to create clear visions of new ways for new people to engage with releasing children from poverty. Our method combines two key elements:

Create a written narrative document that describes the new product/service/experience in customer-friendly language.
Design concepts that visually paint a clear picture of this future world.

This approach allows a team to communicate their destination. With this vision, they can effectively engage different groups across the organization to explore how to make it possible. This approach recently led us to find loveable opportunities to engage new supporters who desire to give to specific needs. By starting with the customer’s perspective, we were able to innovate in ways that genuinely resonated with our audience.

THINK WITH YOUR HANDS

Third, your teams need to think with their hands. This phrase, coined by the well-known design agency IDEO, speaks to the importance of quickly and cheaply bringing ideas to life to understand them better, try them on for size, and get customer feedback. Many ideas can sound great on a whiteboard or in a sketchbook, and once you start bringing them to life, you learn a lot very quickly.

You don’t need fancy tools or trained designers to get started:

Use materials readily available in your office: paper, tape, cardboard, and markers.
Create a rough prototype to give some form to your idea.
For services, gather a few colleagues and act out the concept.
Collect feedback and iterate based on what you learn.

The more teams can bring an idea to life, collect feedback, and iterate, the closer you will be to creating something customers love.

For example, one of our teams implemented this principle at Compassion. They quickly prototyped a new concept for communicating between donors and those on the front lines of poverty. Within a few weeks, they brought the idea to life and collected feedback from potential users. This process allowed us to learn and iterate the concept rapidly, making it more compelling while discarding ideas that didn’t work—even if they seemed great on the whiteboard.

By implementing these three approaches —profoundly understanding the people you are serving, working outside in, and thinking with your hands — you will begin laying a solid foundation for an innovative culture. While it takes time to build strong innovation muscles, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll start seeing ideas and new concepts flowing from all corners of your organization.

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Ryan Russell is Vice President of Innovation at Compassion International. He joined Compassion in July 2023 to lead Compassion Ventures Group and grow Compassion’s innovation function.