Naked Innovation

For my keynote at the JBoye 2014 conference in Aarhus I decided to present a sort of "best-of" deck - the slides and topics that have generated the most conversation and debate over the last 18 months.

Here's the synopsis from the conference website:
Paul-Jervis Heath regularly walks into offices like yours armed only with a sharpie and a mountain of post-it notes. He is a designer and founding principal of Modern Human: a design practice and innovation consultancy. He works with big companies and new startups alike to invent new products and services. In the space of 30-minutes he’ll share practical insights he’s picked up through a 15-year career in which he’s designed everything from in car information systems, connected home appliances and stores of the future.

He will share insights like…
_ Focus groups will not give you insights that drive innovation. The roots of new products and services lie in watching your customers’ behaviour and uncovering their latent needs.

_ Brainstorming gives ideation a bad name. It is not a sensible route to breakthrough ideas. It was conceived to generate tag lines for commercials not complicated things with lots of moving parts like a product or a service.

_ Creative thinkers, such as designers and architects, use synthesis to arrive at solutions rather than analysis. Synthesis is hands-on problem solving and requires sketching, making and iteration to be successful. It eliminates paralysis by analysis, it gives you momentum and anyone can do it.

_ The eureka moment is a myth. New products and services do not arrive fully formed in anyone’s head. It takes rounds and rounds of iteration. Every product or service starts life as a sketch and comes to life through rounds and rounds of continual refinement, prototypes, learning and changing.

_ Any product or service is actually the result of thousands of ideas, often from a host of different disciplines. A concept brings together disparate ideas into a coherent vision for a new product or service.

_ Your concept is only as good as your ability to persuade others of it’s awesomeness. It takes just 9 killer slides to tell a focused story that gets stakeholders onboard.

Transcript

1. MODERN HUMAN NAKED INNOVATION Paul-Jervis Heath, Modern Human. at Aarhus 2014 on Tuesday, 4 November 2014. @modhuman @pauljervisheath
2. IMMERSE IMAGINE INVENT INSPIRE divergent thinking: ideation convergent thinking: conceptual design inspiration: design research validation: prototyping communication: storytelling using high-fidelity mockups @modhuman @pauljervisheath MODERN HUMAN
3. MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
4. Innovation is driven by design research NOT market research. MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
5. MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
6. WORKAROUNDS Quick, seemingly efficient solutions that address the symptoms of a problem not the root cause. What are we looking for? VALUES People’s values play an important role in their motivations. What do they value? What’s important to them? What’s not? INERTIA Situations in which customers act out of habit. How can you leverage or break that inertia? SHOULD VS WANT People struggle with the tension between things they crave in the moment and things they know are good for them in the long term. How can you help people move from where they are to where they want to be? MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
7. There’s no such thing as the eureka moment. Good ideas are hard work. MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
8. Brainstorming is no way to solve wicked problems. MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
9. Source: Does Group Participation When Using Brainstorming Facilitate or Inhibit Creative Thinking? Administrative Science Quarterly. Taylor, Berry & Block, 1958. Quantity of ideas people come up with in a brainstorm Quantity of ideas people come up when working alone x2 MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
10. Source: Does Group Participation When Using Brainstorming Facilitate or Inhibit Creative Thinking? Administrative Science Quarterly. Taylor, Berry & Block, 1958. Using traditional brainstorming When encouraged to discuss and critique each others ideas +20% MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
11. – Plato: Greek Philosopher, Mathematician & Student Of Socrates You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
12. High concepts provide a way of discussing, sharing and testing ideas. MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
13. Designers typically solve problems by synthesis - literally thinking by making MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
14. How designers think: the Architects vs. Scientists experiment MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
15. CHAPTER TITLE. Early-stage rapid prototyping is a way of thinking by making MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath
16. The Status Quo The Observations The Story The Insight The Opportunity The Analogy The Solution The Advantages The Ethos MODERN HUMAN @modhuman @pauljervisheath EMPATHY ANALOGY BELIEF
17. We love our ideas to spread. That’s why this presentation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license. This license allows you and others to remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially. When you do you must acknowledge us, Modern Human, and license any new creations under the identical terms. When in doubt, just ask us. We won’t bite. MODERN HUMAN Paul-Jervis Heath paul@modernhuman.co +44 79 7456 7823 @pauljervisheath