Magellan’s ignite™ innovation system

The ignite™ innovation system is comprised of six steps. Sometimes our clients dive right in and do all six. Sometimes they just dip their toes in, moving toward an innovative culture one step at a time. While we recommend all six steps to achieve truly breakthrough innovations on a continuous basis and develop a culture of innovation, we can accommodate your needs by conducting any or all of these steps for your organization.

The key is to try something different and begin the journey.

Beginning the journey

1. Identify areas of opportunity (focus your innovation efforts).
Determining where to focus your innovation efforts, that is, identifying which types of innovations should be considered and pursued to maximize profits and resources, is possibly the most important stage of innovation – and one that is often overlooked. There are several tools we offer to identify areas of opportunity, depending on the situation.

• MarketFit™ – Identifies which features or attributes of a product or service are most important to customers and prospects and where companies are falling short to pinpoint areas in which to innovate.
  
• IC² Audit™ – To ensure innovation efforts align with company culture, IC² establishes a baseline of an organization’s level of ‘innovativeness’ and measures progress over time.
• Customer Insight – Employs both direct and indirect tools to identify unarticulated needs and deeper emotional drivers. Using methods that directly capture VOC as well as ‘outcome-driven’ techniques such as ethnography and ‘customer stories’ that go beyond the surface and uncover untapped opportunities.

2. Generate innovative ideas.

Depending on the challenge, we work with employee and/or customer ‘idea teams’ to generate ideas for innovations while keeping focused on the challenge at hand. Our structured creative process employs techniques that get people to think differently about a topic, leading to unexpected solutions.

3. Narrow the focus of ideas to the most promising.

Using a multi-tiered evaluation process – from the simplest colored ‘dots’ approach to matrices and other more complex methods such as prediction markets – the multitude of ideas that are generated in the idea-generation phase are refined to a smaller set of the most promising concepts.

4. Investigate ideas further.

Making certain your innovation efforts enhance the alignment between the organization and the marketplace is critical. Ideas are ‘harvested’ and prototyped, often during the ideation session phase. Idea team members are re-contacted and new ideas or enhancements to previously generated ideas often emerge. These ideas are captured and tested in the next phase after discussions with organization decision makers.

5. Test ‘finalist’ ideas.

After ideas have been generated and refined we work with clients to explore potential innovations within the framework of:

• An organization’s culture and goals (e.g., build on core competencies, increase shareholder value, etc.)
• How well they align with the needs of the marketplace
• The competitive landscape
• Future trends

6. Explore potential of ideas in the marketplace.

The final stage is to assess new concepts in the marketplace. To test ideas with large numbers of people to quantitatively rank the most promising as well as reduce the risk of implementing innovations that are less likely to be successful, we use a variety of tools.

• Market Research - Whether through focus groups, online surveys, in-person interviews or other research techniques, we present concepts to key customer groups to get their reactions and determine how likely the proposed innovations will move them to the desired behavior (e.g., purchase or customer loyalty) as well as how the innovations can be enhanced, marketed, and so on.
• Prediction Markets - 'Betting pools', an evaluation method based on the rule of large numbers, are administered among internal audiences and/or externally in the marketplace, depending on the situation. Ideas are 'betted on', and with sufficient numbers of participants making 'bets', the best ones stand out.

Take to market and continue to manage innovation.

Completing the loop of continuous innovation means following procedures to ensure that innovative ideas are implemented, that the company encourages and rewards continuous innovation, and that innovations are monitored after market introduction. We recommend post-launch measures to continually assess the success of innovations in order to quickly make any necessary changes to increase the probability of success.