How to engage stakeholders with your NPD/innovation process

Top tips inside

It can be really hard to develop new products and services in organisations just set up for BAU work.

It's important therefore to bring stakeholders up to speed with innovation practices as there is a HUGE difference in approach and mindset required for managing an established product/service vs developing new ones.

Key things to remember and emphasise to stakeholders 👇

✅ Good ideas and bad ideas look the same at the start

✅ Making up numbers for fancy forecasting spreadsheets before you've run any experiments isn’t a good use of time

✅ Risk is high with innovation because the opportunity is new - with existing products and services you can rely a lot more on past performance

So what should you do instead? 🤔

✅ Encourage an assumptions-led approach

✅ Turn these into hypotheses

✅ Run tests & experiments (e.g. smoke-screen tests, concierge MVP etc). Reduce risk by investing small amounts of time and money

✅ Collect evidence. If your hypothesis is refuted, kill or pivot the idea. If it supports your hypothesis, keep investing and adapting the idea as you learn more.