Your company is in a need of new idea, facing a business challenge and you need some help. Whom do you turn too? Your business partner, colleagues or maybe an expert from your industry. But have you ever thought of bringing every employee you have on a discussion table to find new ideas, tackle new challenges and most importantly build a company meant to succeed.
This might not seem to be a thing that many companies have been doing, but you must try it once and would certainly feel influx of new and creative idea. The process is called creative sprints and is used by Google Ventures. Let’s take a look at the process flow of the creative sprints-
- What’s the Challenge?- Gather the entire team and tell them about the current challenge the company is facing. Try explaining every possible details in as simple format as problem so that everyone understands it. If you have some guideline share it with everyone, tell the priority of the problems. Next give everyone some time to do research on the topic. You may also give some resources like case studies, online journals, competitor's website, etc. related to the problem that can help your team to get a good idea and probable solutions for business. Give anywhere between 4-7 days for people to research, depending on the severity of the challenge.
- Discuss- Once the team has researched about the challenges, it’s time to have a brainstorming session. Ask everyone to write the ideas on a paper and also speak out their ideas and suggestions on stage.
Once the ideas has been shared the harder part is to select which idea is the best to work on. The suggestion we would give is to put all the sheets with ideas on a board and ask people to evaluate it. The criterion of evaluation can be ease of implementation, usefulness for your customers and any other criterion relevant to your business. On a scale of 1 to 5 ask everyone to give points to each idea based on the evaluation criterion.
After people have evaluated it choose the top 5 scoring ideas and re-discuss it with the entire team again. Discuss the pros and cons in depth, take some time and if possible rope in some external person(knowledgeable in the domain) who can give their views on the idea. Give 2-4 days for the discussion period.
- Development and testing- So, finally after a long brainstorming session you have decided to move forward with an idea. It’s time to bring that idea to life. The first thing would be to build a prototype which can be tried and tested by employees of your company and some loyal customers. Now developing the prototype depends on which industry you are. If you are in a software company you need to develop the prototype of the software. Now if you are in custom t-shirt design business and the challenge is to develop an exclusive t shirt for a celebrity. You need to make several variants of tshirt design so as to assess which one would be better.
Once you have made the prototype it’s time to test it. Ask your team, few selected group of user to use the prototype and note what they feel about it. Thereafter get reviews from the people who have used the prototype, discuss it again with the team and make required changes. The time for development and testing can take anywhere between 1 week to 4 months depending on the product you are building, team behind the product, etc.
- The Final Battle- You discussed the problem, got some amazing solutions, build a prototype and got it tested. So far so good. Now comes the final battle of building a product keeping all the factors in mind. But interestingly enough, it would be lot simpler since you have the entire flow of how to make the product, what to include and what not to include, etc. Again this can take anywhere between 1 week to 8 months.
After making the final product, do not take a long time to place it in the market. The longer you wait the more are the chances of your competitors leading ahead. Also the run doesn’t end here. You have to keep taking customer surveys, see recent market trend and make changes in your product accordingly.
So, the next time you face a business challenge make sure that you include your entire team to search for the solution and we promise that you would get amazing outcomes. What are your views on this? Do share it in the comment box below.