Usually performance reviews are good for two things:

Creating more work, usually in the way of forms to fill in and...
Personal development (yuck!)

That said Vicky and I also took the opportunity to look at our innovation pipeline in a bit more detail and, considering the successes and failures over the last year, seek to build on it.

Involving customers early on in the engineer visits concept was an overwhelming success, giving us exactly the sort of feedback we needed to redevelop our service offer before releasing to a larger audience. Customer feedback and colleague insight can easily get us to this point. We also identified that keeping control of high profile concepts is an ongoing battle. We've witnessed stakeholders trying to accelerate new-born concepts straight through to pilot if they've been hyped up. If you're not sure what's wrong with that, click here for the tests v. pilots post. Innovation is as much about winning hearts and minds as following a pipeline, guys.

We also talked about how, while concepts do need a certain level of individual design, without a physical reminder of the pipeline I'll start winging it for sure. No Bueno. If concepts worked we wouldn't know why and couldn't repeat it. If they didn't we couldn't be certain about what we've learned...

So without further ado here is the first installment of our innovation pipeline - the six stages of exploration needed before you start mocking up ideas and solutions.

Got any comments, praise or just want a shoulder to cry on? Hit up the lab on @BromfordLab or myself, on the particularly inspiring account @ThomasHartland. More to come!