Innovation is a great word. It’s filled with such hope and is ambiguous enough to let great ideas and thoughts shine through. Innovation is a critical concept when working through brainstorming and idea generation sessions but I have come to dislike the word innovation. These days, the word innovation makes me shudder and cringe but only within a certain context: when I am working on projects that are limited by some sort of constraint that does not allow the free flow of ideas yet we have the task of “innovating”. What is a UX Designer to do?
I’ve been giving this issue some thought lately because it seems to crop up on a fairly regular basis and I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason for my aversion is really quite simple: lack of a shared understanding between the people paying the bill at the end of the day (we’ll call them the client) and the people doing the work (we’ll call them the service provider) on what exactly innovation means and how it will be measured. I am working on a project right now that is going through this exact pain point. We keep hearing the “i” word and we have tried numerous times to draw out exactly what the client expects from us in terms of innovation but it is a little bit like pulling teeth. We even went so far as to create a document that laid out what the client’s expectation of innovation was and how our solutions were addressing their expectations. All fine and good but we’re still hearing the “i” word which may be a case of bad communication, but I think there more to it than simply not seeing eye to eye.
I think the most important this to consider when discussing innovation is the context and domain of the product/service deemed to become “innovative”. How does the innovation fit into the existing “ecosystem”? Is it something new or is it an already established product/service? Are there customer expectations around what your product/service should do? How far can you push things before making customers grumpy? This discussion will lead directly into the details surrounding the innovation. Great ideas and innovations cannot live a vacuum and need a channel/medium for delivery so really we can’t discuss the where without simultaneously discussing the what.
It is kind of like doing a risk analysis for ideas and agreeing on how far innovations should go and if there is any real value in the proposed innovations or is it simply innovation for the sake of innovation…
Once we’ve all agreed on what innovations are going to happen where, the next thing to be discussed should be success metrics. How will we know if our innovations are working? Ideas that involve tangible products or sales are easy but service offerings are trickier simply because they are typically surrounded by more qualitative measurements and don’t translate as well to fancy pie charts and line graphs touting the awe-inspiring growth of our innovation 
Regardless, we still need to decide what success looks like. And now that we all agree on what innovation means to the project and how we’re gong to measure success, we can move forward and build something great, solve the problem and, most importantly, INNOVATE!
In hindsight, we should have stopped everything the first time we heard the “i” word and made sure we all understood and agreed upon the definition, scope and metrics of innovation. Needless to say, I will be adding the “Innovation Full Stop” tactic to my list of tricks.