Michelle Mallott – Creative Industries Development Agency (CIDA)

Session demonstrating an innovation process she has used in the gaming and service-development industries.

The process revolves around creating a sentence that describes a product, who it is for, what it does and why it is different. Example:

FOR unsheffield conference attendees WHO need to understand their customers/services, THE rapid improvement process IS A collaborative and iterative format THAT quickly defines products and services. UNLIKE traditional brainstorming sessions, OURS uses an open source philosophy to converge broad ideas into meaningful product.

Michelle ran a quick workshop with the group. Two projects were selected:

 - Sustainable IT – Trying to find ways to make IT more sustainable.
 - The fun maths thing – Make maths curriculum more engaging while making teachers’ lives easier.

Each step in the process is conducted by the group, but each member of the group writes down their answers (on post-it notes) in silence. Post-its are then stuck to a wall / table / floor against each question. The questions are:

For = intended audience (for the project)?
Who = wants, needs, desires (of the audience).
The = offer, undertaking. What product delivers the needs for the intended audience?
Is a = description, concept, format: describe what the offer is.
That = achieves. What aim does the product achieve?
Unlike = differentiators, competition
Ours = differentiating features.

After all answers have been collected, the post-its are aggregated together and duplicates are removed. The group then silently sorts by relevance the answers to each question, moving the most relevant answers to the left and less relevant ones to the right. Similar answers can be combined at this stage. The answers on the far left should really represent the essence of the emerging product.

The sentence is then constructed by reading down the left-hand side of the wall / floor / table, interjecting the keywords for each question.

The two sentences that our workshops produced were:

The fun maths thing: FOR young people WHO want GCSEs and not to feel stupid THE game that delivers maths by stealth IS A learning format THAT changes social perceptions of maths. UNLIKE blackboard-banging, OURS is more stimulating.

Sustainable IT: FOR corporate office users and IT managers WHO want cost savings, THE recyclable IT IS A concept THAT provides lower power consumption. UNLIKE high powered games machines and recycled plastic PCs containing carcinogenic fire retardants, OURS reuse and are powered by potatoes.

The significant thing is that now we have a whole host of ideas that represent first iterations of products. The content this method produces can be mixed and matched, built upon and used to spawn other ideas. The process is iterative.

Q: Are there other “sentence structures” that work in different places?

Q: In which areas of work / industry / public sector etc might this process work?

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