Week 4

How can innovation be organised in processes?

As part of my innovation lab class as the name suggests it revolves around innovation. Having had no prior knowledge or expierence with innovation I have come to realise that Innovation is a step by step process and can be organised into processes. Each week we move through these different processes in a logical and structured format as we work on our innovative solutions to the problems we have come across and our tutors guide and facilitate us as we work through these innovation processes.

Space was clearly an issue in classrooms

Lounge area for older students

Possibility to maximise wide corridor space

This week we worked on the first two process of innovation. The first process was the discovery/ empathy phase. This involved us going to Stengaardsskolen School for a field visit. This school visit had been organised by our tutors. Firstly, we got the chance to have a general tour of the school and meet some people like the principal, the janitor and a teacher. Afterwards we split into our separate groups (which we have been working in the previous weeks) to gain a unique and detailed insight into the school. Our group gained a good insight into the school through observations and interviewing the janitor, teachers, department leader and pupils. We took notes during our observations and interviews so as not to forget any important information. Having already organised an interview schedule in the previous week it proved very useful as we could use and extend the questions that we already had to suit the interviewees and the context. Our observations took us throughout the school, both indoor and outdoor as we wanted to observe the environment collectively. We also took plenty of photographs for evidence and was another good method of recording information easily. Overall the discovery phase of innovation was very useful as it helped us get a unique and vital insight into the school, its problems and allowed for opportunities to interview the very users we would be trying to innovatively solve the problem for.

My group's interpretation

When we arrived back at University we regrouped and moved into the second process of innovation the interpretation/ define phase. Here we discussed with each other stories of what we had gained from our first process. While we listened to everyone's stories in our group we were given post-it notes and encouraged to jot down words or phrases that came to our minds when we listened to the stories. We then moved on to grouping these post-it notes into common themes and were encouraged not to group these notes by stories which you can see from the picture.

The next step in the innovation process was to define these insights into a concise expression of what we had learned from our discovery phase. It was helpful to write this out in the form of a 'POV' (Point of view) statement which makes an insight specific to a user. Some of my group's insights included "students need a place to relax in order to help them perform better" and "students need to have an incentive to run their free time responsibly" etc.


Finally we moved on to making these insights actionable which took the form of a 'How might we...' statement. One of our 'How Might We' statements were "How might we create an incentive that would help students become responsible with their free time". This will then form the beginnings of coming up with creative solutions to some of these problems.


Although in class this week we only went through two processes it is clear to see that there are many processes in innovation. Altogether there are five processes and the other processes include the ideation phase, the experimentation/ prototype and test phase and the evolution/ iterate/ delivery and evaluate phase. I am looking forward to becoming involved in each of these phases as we go along and developing my knowledge, understanding and skills regarding innovation.