Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Nathan Baird, Wiley, $34.95.
The sub-title says it all. Innovation and design go together … more than you may think … according to Sydney-based innovation consultant Nathan Baird.
He shares his “learnings and experiences of what works and what doesn’t”.
“This is not a book of scientifically researched methods – that hasn’t been the journey I chose. It is practical and applied. It is based on tens of thousands of hours leading and training innovation, thousands of workshops and hundreds of client partnerships and collaborations across multiple industries and continents. It is a story, and method, of what works from experience.”
This Playbook teaches you how to apply the design thinking method to innovation and helps you to innovate better with five practical and proven stages. These are to build the right team for innovation, better understand your customer through empathy, distill and refine customer-centric needs and insights, unleash your team’s creativity to create fresh new ideas to address customer needs and experiment and validate desirable, feasible and viable solutions.
With international knowledge and 21 years of hands-on experience, Baird shares his tools and methods for developing a winning customer-centric approach to innovation.
Innovation drives growth in organisations and entire economies. Yet innovation is hard, risky and rarely successful. Most innovations and startups fail because of a lack of focus on the ‘front end’ of the innovation process where customer needs are researched, insights are distilled, solutions are ideated, prototyped and tested and business models are shaped.
“The front end of innovation being the stages from project initiation, exploratory research, customer need generation, ideation to concept development (prototyping and testing). Everything that comes before development, commercialisation and launch.”
“The further you progress along the innovation journey, the more time – and resource-intensive and expensive it becomes. So getting your upfront work done right is critical; it lays the foundation for every thing that follows.”
