Mind Mapping for more effective Innovation - a Reflection    Challenge    I work for a technology services company and am responsible for rolling out innovative new  Digital services and offerings, to be delivered by internal teams as well as external partners.  Over the last 18+ months, in the AI & Data Science space, we have been struggling with  getting enough engagement and feedback from our market facing teams, i.e. Sales, Account  Management and Solutioning teams, to make our offerings both innovative and relevant to  the market. We’ve been trying to follow the Learning Launch process, but found ourselves  unable to get to grips with clients’ unstated needs, which is critical in an emerging  technology space – when we did ideation sessions with our market facing teams, we found  ourselves falling prey to one of the following:

-  ‘Google’itis – where the ideas generated were based on basic web research and  hence neither deep nor innovative.

-  Subject to HiPO bias – the Highest Paid Opinion would win over others, and in  addition this would often insist on killing other ideas ‘because these will not scale’

-  Repeating what we had done for a client elsewhere, so that cookie-cutter ideas  predominated, regardless of whether these were relevant for other industries and  clients

It was clear that if we had to succeed, we needed to change the way we did ideation and  came up with Use Cases around which we build our solutions.     Selection    Mind Mapping would be at the heart of the new approach, as I felt that our usual  structured approach to creating business cases has been failing to capture the potential and  possibilities of an emerging technology area – we needed to find a way to allow for  exploration, but in a manner that led to concrete outputs based on data, rather than pie-in- the-sky ideas.     Application    In the last few weeks, we have rolled out a revised methodology with the following key  features:

-  Ideation sessions to always be in-person, for maximum engagement, in workshop  mode

-  The kickoff sessions would always present data from primary and secondary  research, with actual clients and prospects. (Refinement…) As well as substantial  amounts of content from experts in the relevant technologies/ tools to ensure that  the potential of these was fully understood

-  Most important, we adopted Mind Mapping techniques to flesh out the personas/  wants/ key success criteria of key stakeholders and buyers in our target industries  and enterprises – building these out on the basis of the research data, best practices  and stories from our partners and technology experts and conversations with key

clients and prospects. These have helped us uncover and refine *real* business  problems and opportunities, eliminate guesswork and kill lazy rehashing of what  someone read on the web or what was done elsewhere.

-  In addition, we also implemented other ideation techniques like silent ideation (for a  fixed amount of time), after which each person came up and presented their ideas  with one per sticky note, with others discarding any duplicates. Each person also had  to attach their sticky notes to the relevant Mind Map on the board, with a brief  verbal explanation of how it was relevant, why it met a clear need/ opportunity and  who would be the target beneficiary/ buyer for this service/ offering.

Insight    This has helped us achieve the following:

-  Use Cases are now based on data, real feedback and insights from clients and  prospects

-  Our services and offerings are now targeted at specific personas, addressing deep  needs and opportunities, with differentiated solutions that have already started to  change the tone of our conversation with clients

-  A much higher level of engagement from our market facing teams, as they have a  deeper understanding of the potential solutions and are energized by their market  potential

We are now rolling this methodology out for all our innovation workshops, where Mind  Mapping is central, but is also always based on rigorous research and data gathering  prior to the workshop session. It has also thrown up lacunae in this process of research –  in the past we have had major successes in innovation projects with field observation  using ethnographic methods, but this has not been rolled out as a consistent set of  practices, with the result that the quality of research and data on user behaviour and  needs varies from project to project. We are now addressing this as a critical area, so  that the Mind Mapping process and subsequent ideation is based on a more solid data  foundation.  And some of the market leading companies in the Data Science space,  having participated in some of our workshop sessions, are now rolling out this  methodology to all their other partners!

