Leveraging the learning launch tool to test innovation formats  Alexandra Beyer    Challenge:  Within my organization, I am working in the innovation lab and responsible for developing  innovation formats that will attract many clients, helping them to create innovative ideas for their  business. These innovation formats are supposed to serve as an initial inspiration phase, in  which we elaborate with them future business development opportunities that will help them  grow. Ideally, the clients will request future services from us such as the implementation of the  generated ideas or further workshops with a wider range of colleagues from their organization.  The challenge is to identify a set of innovation formats that suit to the potential client’s  requirements, budget and time frame and that provides the right environment and methods to  ignite the client’s ideas and future visions. Together with my team, we have developed several  innovation formats in theory, based on previous workshop experiences and innovation theory,  but we never tested these newly created innovation formats with potential client’s yet. It was  unclear to us, whether we could use the innovation formats within different industries and  whether the format would fit to the client’s way of working.    Selection:  Before starting a large marketing campaign for our new offerings, we need to test them with a  selected group of potential customers. After assessing different tools, it was clear to me that the  learning launch tool seems to be the perfect tool as it is a small experiment that tests my new  ideas in the real marketplace and allows me to reiterate it and refine it, based on the potential  client’s reaction. My decision was inspired by the IBM story, which leveraged the trade show  Sibos to validate their concepts in real life. Starting with a hypothesis and key assumptions, this  tool assesses the idea’s value creation, the way it is executed, its dependability and scalability  and designs the ideal experiment with the real target group. This would allow us to assess  whether our idea could be scaled to different client bases and industries and if it was suitable to  their way of working. By using the learning launch process structure and the learning launch  design table from Oliver Beyer, I could thoroughly detail out my ideas and prepare the experiment. I  defined the experiment as a ‘soft launch event’ of the new innovation lab on the topic of artificial  intelligence, which contained several breakout sessions, where the clients elaborated ideas  around the topic of AI and where I could test different innovation formats with real potential  customers.      Application:  To prepare the experiment thoroughly, I started with Oliver Beyer’s learning launch process  framework and stated the hypothesis that my innovation formats were better than the  alternatives out there and will enable my future potential customers to come up with new value- adding ideas that they can implement within their organization. I defined key assumptions such  as the applicability of the innovation formats to different industries and its scalability to different  company departments and countries. I prioritized the key assumptions and invited the target  groups that were selected based on the assumptions, international clients, from different  departments and industries.  Then, I filled the learning launch design template by Oliver Beyer and stated the key assumptions  together with the target group, the way I wanted to test them, the timeframe and the cost. This  resulted in the creation of my event, which I framed around a specific topic (artificial intelligence)  and offered them the added value of listening to keynote speakers and explore the latest  developments within these technologies. During the event, which was a real success as  numerous potential clients participated, I conducted the breakout sessions together with my  team and thus tested the innovation formats with the real marketplace. In the end, we included  feedback opportunities so that we did not only have our observations as a feedback, but also the  honest and direct feedback from our potential customers.     Insight:  The result of the soft launch event surprised me positively. First, we had full house and many  customers stayed until the very end, participating actively in all breakout sessions. Second, we  could observe this trend across the different industries that came, and we validated our  assumption, that the innovation formats would work successfully across industries. Third, we

generated creative and valuable ideas in almost every innovation format that we conducted,  which showed that the formats where well elaborated and suitable for the way of working of our  potential customers.   However, I realized that for one of the innovation formats, I did not (want to) see that it did not  work as well as I expected. During the experiment I did not understand why the customers were  not able to elaborate ideas and were not effective during their session. After analysing the  session the day after, I reminded the confirmation bias and that I was striving for positive  confirmation of my formats, even though they were not yet designed correctly. I wanted and  expected that all my ideas would work without problems, as I simply strived for a confirmation.  My colleague provided me with her view on how the format could be refined and it made sense.  So I understood that it is completely irrelevant who developed the idea but that it is more  important to objectively focus on the idea itself without judging and to absorb the feedback form  the customers as a positive input that will help to optimize the idea.     Approach:  The most important learning for me was that you need to have a neutral view on your ideas, no  matter if they were created by you or by someone else. Next time, I would remind myself of not  judging anyone for their ideas but to simply and objectively test them and absorb the feedback  as a positive input to be able to bring the ideas to perfection afterwards. Honest and real-life  feedback is the most valuable asset you can get while creating a business or an idea and the  learning launch tool definitely enables it. I would apply the learning launch tool in such situation  again at any time, as it provided us with honest and valuable feedback from the real marketplace  and we could refine some formats until they suited perfectly to our customer’s requirements.

