EXPLORATION BACKPACKS
Overview
The Hiffi Exploration Backpacks are a collection of innovation toolkits. Each of these toolkits is comprised by tools and associated techniques that are the most basic devices for practical implementation.
A backpack is used by an innovator or agile team for a specific purpose that needs certain activity types with a predominant thinking mode (e.g. if creativity is needed, the “ideate” backpack provides tools and techniques to support this).
When faced with uncertainties, knowledge gaps, decisions to be made and value to be built and deployed, an innovator or innovation team can define a short sequence of activities enabled by tools and techniques from the backpacks to facilitate concrete outcomes.
Orient backpack
The “orient backpack” (also called “compass”) orients the innovation effort and gives it transparency. At the highest level, it supports the management of the Strategic Innovation System (SIS) and at the innovation process level it is associated with the management of a particular innovation endeavour.
A Strategic Innovation System (SIS) should be able to facilitate the planning, setup and iteration of any activity that may be necessary to achieve the desired outcomes.
Understand
The “understand backpack” supports the learning about the enterprise, the external environment and its stakeholders.
A Strategic Innovation System (SIS) should be able to: a) provide a means to identify potential opportunities and threats by exploring market, competitive and technology developments from internal and external sources; b) support the framing and development of an opportunity by facilitating insights about current reality and future scenarios; and c) identify important unmet needs of customer/stakeholders; so that timely and relevant information can be provided to business leaders and innovators.
Evaluate
The “evaluate backpack” supports the decision-making on what opportunities or concepts to work on and allocate resources.
A Strategic Innovation System (SIS) should be able to evaluate every opportunity or concept as necessary, as well as to look at an entire portfolio of initiatives in order to prioritize them and focus resources on the ‛best bets’ so that the potential value for the organization can be maximized.
Ideate
The “ideate backpack” supports the generation of ideas and concepts, including possible solutions or business models as well as ideas for experiments, features and functionalities.
A Strategic Innovation System (SIS) should be able to provide a means to systematically generate new possibilities creatively and build an understanding of what holds strategic meaning, and hence new value for the organization and its customers, suppliers, employees and other stakeholders.
Experiment
The purpose of the “experiment backpack” is to support the testing of key assumptions that underlie an idea, concept or business model.
A Strategic Innovation System (SIS) should be able to provide a means to learn whether a solution or feature would work or not for a customer and other key stakeholders as early, rapidly and inexpensively as possible. The quest is to efficiently obtain evidence (data, information, observations or facts) to learn whether a solution or feature is viable for the organization by validating (or invalidating) its desirability, feasibility, defensibility and impact through experiments.
