Challenge. I work in a company who develops software systems for corporate customers. Very often,  people from our teams or even customer employees share with us ideas to create software products,  services, optimize processes, savings, etc. All those ideas are very interesting but sometimes seems like  a waste of time. I work in the Innovation area and my responsibility is to evaluate new ideas and if  valuable, put together a development-funding project to create such solution.

Our company tries to encourage every employee to share these initiatives, and I as evaluator, have to be  very professional when assessing and selecting viable ideas.

Selection. The Learning Launch tool is a very important framework for me because guides us from the  initial exploration of the idea and who would be happy if the idea works, until documenting information  which confirms or disconfirms the feasibility of the idea.

I try to avoid having a very skeptical attitude towards new ideas, but also I try to be as objective as  possible; this tool lets me write down hypothesis, scenarios and share the result of the tests with my  colleagues, in order to make decisions to improve the idea (pivot) or find another one.

Reflection - Learning launch

Application. I created a very simple application where employees can share their ideas and on a weekly  basis I am responsible to review those ideas and give feedback to the employee.

For every idea which passes a first checklist, I get in touch with the proponent to start a learning launch  and define the persona(s) who would be the customer and its specific need or problem, and the benefits  our solution (idea) will bring them.

After that, we define the scope of the research we will conduct: number of interviews, questionnaires, find  alternative solutions or competitors.

There is a huge amount of work here but very valuable, so getting to define the scope of the test can  sometimes give me information supporting a go/no-go decision.

Finally, the learning launch outputs are inputs when working to configure the project to fund and create the  product/service based on the proposed idea.

Insight and approach. The use of the Learning launch brought to my attention the fact-oriented decision.  Because we can be very enthusiastic about our ideas and when sharing them with others, sometimes  feedback is not well received. But if you create not only an innovative environment, but also a  test-oriented environment, people gets not only enthusiastic but also more careful and gives their ideas a  second and third thought, and test it themselves.

This has improved the quality of the initiatives and also gives me more detailed information in the next  steps of the project to implement the idea (innovation).

