This week we’ve relaunched the Innovation and Design service here at Bromford as part of the wider transformation plans to ensure that the business remains future-ready.
It’s been a while since we first started thinking about refreshing our service offer, using our Designing the Lab sessions as a vehicle for taking both an introspective look at how we currently work and what we work on, and an out-ward facing look at the challenges faced by colleagues as well as understanding the unmet needs of the wider business. As a result, we’ve been able to learn more about the value we bring to colleagues, which has provided us with useful insight in terms of refreshing our service offer for the start of a new decade.
An outline of our refreshed service offer
As a rule of thumb, around 70% of time for most organisations is dedicated to continuous improvement, 20% to transformation, and 10% to radical innovation. For the Innovation and Design Service, we want to flip that on its head.
This ratio is perhaps unsurprising. The gravity of innovation tends to pull organisations into continuous improvement activity because it’s less risky, is easily tracked, readily reportable and often specifically triggered in response to current trends in performance reporting/feedback. It’s entirely understandable that organisations focus on continual improvement; why would a business not want to address poorly performing KPIs that impact it’s employees or customers or bottom line? The issue is that as a dedicated Innovation and Design function within the business, we had also found ourselves gravitating towards continuous improvement and transformation for much the same reasons.
“The question we’ve been asking ourselves is, if we are focusing more and more on continuous improvement and transformational activity, who’s left to envisage, explore and fulfil more radical innovation?”
So, the question we’ve been asking ourselves is, if we are focusing more and more on continuous improvement and transformational activity, who’s left to envisage, explore and fulfil more radical innovation? How might we balance an immediate need to support and invigorate continuous improvement across the organisation, with the capacity and broadness of mind to meaningfully work on problems of the future?
Relaunching the Innovation and Design Service as an agent of change
Over the past 6 months, we’ve been developing our service offer around three key characteristics or horizons of innovation:
Horizon 1 - Continuous improvement through incremental improvements, extensions, variants and cost reduction in existing markets.
Horizon 2 - Transformation through operational efficiencies and reimagining the problems of today with new opportunities in emerging markets.
Horizon 3 - Radical and aspirational innovation that seeks to break the mould, working from a vision of where we want the future to be rather than being constrained by the issues of today.
The 3 Horizons underpin our service offer and the products we have developed.
For innovation and design activity to be sustainable at Bromford, we believe that we must democratise it; supporting colleagues and teams with a super light to medium touch in order to undertake their own continuous improvement and transformation activity, freeing up our limited resources to concentrate on higher risk, higher yield, transformative and radically different activity - balancing the need for short-term gains with the ultimate goal of achieving longer-term gains.
As a result, we’ve developed four key products which will frame our work moving forward. Over the next 12 to 24 months we will develop these products further as we learn through doing.
Screenshot of our four products taken from the re-launched Bromford Lab website.
Through our review and vision products, we’re now able to measure the impact we have in terms of work which doesn’t always take the form of end-to-end design activity. As an in-house team we’ve learned that much of the value we bring to the business isn’t through the number of services or product solutions we release, but in the everyday facilitation, support and guidance we offer colleagues to help unstick their thinking or offer fresh perspectives. Previously, this would have been lost, but by having a vehicle through which to scope these types of activity as pieces of work in their own right, we are now able to demonstrate the impact we are making against clearly defined expected outcomes. Both review and vision can also act as a gateway to our more structured innovation and design products - guide and drive.
Our guide product is our framework for democratised, self-led innovation and design. Through the provision of hands-on support at key milestones and access to tool-kits and templates, we will support teams to explore challenges or opportunities in a light, fast and reliable way. Our drive product is the culmination of over five years of leading innovation activity at Bromford. We lead these types of project by accelerating new ideas to their inevitable conclusion in a safe-to-fail sandbox environment. Problem definition and root cause analysis, ideation, prototyping and then testing and piloting (where necessary) all add confidence that the outcome is the right one, even if that is to go back to the drawing board.
You can find out more about our four products by visiting the product area of our relaunched website. Use the links at the top of this post to check out our refreshed Exploration Pipeline Trello Board or to check out some of our case studies.
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