What’s the deal with the Innovation Tactics deck from Pip Decks? I ordered the deck as part of the early release, and I’ve gone through each card to identify ways I’ll use the deck. In my Innovation Tactics First Look I’ll describe

What are Innovation Tactics?

As mentioned in the recent article on Strategy Tactics, all of the Pip Decks cards are focused on praxis – converting big ideas into practical steps that individuals and teams can put into play in their work. Innovation Tactics provides recipes that can help push ideas, products, experiences, and services forward, toward their future state. “Tactics” themselves are highly applicable, and in this regard, the deck delivers, just as the other decks in the series have.

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How does the Pip Decks Innovation Tactics deck help people and teams explore innovation?

Like other Pip Decks, the Innovation Tactics cards are built around a set of objectives.

Situation
Do you know the challenge you want to focus on? If not, a set of “situation” cards help you explore where you, your team, your customers and your market category are stuck. Understanding that helps you clarify what you can work on to identify innovations in your work.

Focus
Innovation can be immense and hard to frame in a way that allows you to progress. A set of cards called “focus” help you understand which part of a “big challenge” are most important to people, such that you can create a change that is meaningful, whether it’s a very small change that feels earth shattering, or a new modality that completely changes the way we engage the world and one another.

Signals
It can also be challenging to capture and interpret the signals people in the world are putting out. The “signals” cards help you discover meaningful pathways to explore based on social, interpersonal, media and other factors that can spark innovation pathways.

For example, did Apple ask people if they wanted touch screen phone devices that would change the screen’s functionality based on what icon you pressed? No! They had to intuit from a lot of social signals and exploration of opportunities before developing the touchscreen phone. These cards help creators figure out what they need to draw out from the world in order to create meaningful change.

The other three categories in the deck are “ideas,” “probe,” and “sense.” We will look at some cards from each category soon.

The process of innovation is rarely linear, so the structure of the Innovation Tactics deck allows innovators or innovation teams to jump around, choosing the right tool based on where they find themselves in the innovation process and where they are headed. In addition to the fact that the situation innovators find themselves in at any one time can be malleable, they can require a variety of disciplinary skills as well.

Innovation Tactics Draws on Multiple Professional Practices

The Innovation Tactics deck by Pip Decks includes knowledge and skills from multiple professional practices:

Business modeling: Innovation can occur in the way a business or business processes are planned, developed, and executed. A portion of the cards are designed to help you think from a business perspective about how you are coordinating work toward an innovative outcome.

Social Science and ethnography: The field of anthropology uses a set of skills to observe and document while watching or participating in a cultural context different from their own called “ethnography.” An industrial designer that follows cave climbers on a risky adventure may learn something that can result in better, safer, or more fun caving or climbing experiences.

Experiential models including market research, design thinking, product development, and UI/UX: engaging with select customers or prospects in a more synthetic setting allows you to create a controlled environment where you can learn from your focus audience.

Narrative and storytelling: stories help to shape imagination and to understand beliefs and attitudes. Creative teams can create their own stories about how a customer might use an innovation, or they can ask their target customer to tell them stories about how and when they use products or services. Good, bad, fun, frustrating. Each type of story informs the creative process.

Teamwork: Whenever an innovation is being created by a group of individuals for a group of individuals it’s important to understand who does what in your innovation space. Teamwork cards help groups clarify the roles, skills and processes customers go through while engaging in the space you are working to innovate. Innovations could simplify processes so more people get complete results with less time and effort. Maybe the innovation is simply about process flow, helping the people involved have more fun with fewer bumped elbows.

What are the main types of innovation that Innovation Tactics supports?

Many writers have divided innovation into radical innovation and incremental innovation, but they aren’t the only models.

Radical innovations make a major shift in the way humans engage in the world: the creation and distribution of electricity, the development of computing, the creation of the moving assembly line. Each radical change shifts the way we work and think about resources and the creation of products, goods and services that we use.

Incremental innovation, on the other hand, is founded on the small steps – if you can create a car on a moving assembly line, maybe you can add quality assurance at each step to result in more consistent results across all products produced. If you can regulate and distribute consistent electrical currents, maybe those can be used for heating, or cooling, or lighting, or transmitting radio waves and converting them into sound. 



In fact, radical and incremental innovations are contextual. The creation of the light bulb is a small step in the long march from capturing lightning with a kite to the development of the electrical grid we now know, so in that respect, it’s a micro-innovation. On the other hand, the ability to mass produce bulbs that would put out consistent light levels required many tiny innovations in terms of filaments, gasses or vacuum-sealed glass bulbs, positive and negative connectors, and more. The light bulb is its own macro innovation in relation to the many trials, failures, and discoveries that led to its invention.

How can individual Innovation Tactics cards represent practices from each discipline?

Below I’ll describe a few cards. Not all cards in the deck are addressed, but for each one, I’ll indicate which discipline I recognize in the card, then note which category the card is from (situation, ideas, focus, signals, probe, and sense), then describe how the card can become useful as you work with it.

Discipline – Business Modeling:

Situation card – Chasm Crossing. This card is about evaluating when organizational focus can shift from scaling existing ideas and products to creating something new. It highlights the “chasm” between an initial idea, full of energy and vigor, and the real effort it takes to move from idea to adopted new modality, product, process…. This card points the way when you have an idea that seems worth developing. How do you overcome the chasm and turn the initial energy into a series of business steps that allow you to develop and test the viability of your idea? With a series of recommended innovation steps and processes described on specific cards within the deck.

Focus card- Seeds vs. Soil. This card is all about separating the things you can research “soil” from things you simply need to plant to see what will come of them “seeds.” The framework is focused around organizing your development ideas so that you can get some things going to see what comes of them, and you can dig into the “soil” research – what conditions are most suited to growing something we already know we want to plant and grow?” By dividing up these elements we can then identify which are the critical items to work on now, and which we can work on over time or postpone. The outcome? The conversion of “possibility” into a “program of innovation and development.”

Focus card – Solve for distribution. One of the biggest challenges for innovators is to understand how and where a prospective customer will experience and select your new, innovative solution over simply doing things the way they always have. Solving for distribution is creating a customer journey that helps you understand where your business needs to be in order to present and make your innovative offer. Once you know where the customer will be when they are ready to experience and make the choice, you can work the steps to clarify exactly how you will get your product to the customer at that time and in that place.

Social Science and Ethnography:
Situation card – Observation. An ethnographic design researcher that served on one of my advisory councils in Portland Oregon had worked on research for a refrigerator manufacturer in Japan that resulted in the design of one of the top selling refrigerators in the country. The fridge gained its market position because of an observation he and his team made, not in a research skunk-works or looking at a white board filled with sticky notes, but in everyday kitchens in Japanese homes. Participants in the research kept using a word to describe their favorite kitchen items that translates to English as “more the same.” When a fridge was “more the same,” it was at peace, in its place – not too showy but not invisible either. Most importantly, the fridge was perfectly shaped and sized to hold Japanese food packages in precise order. “More the same” was the concept that got designers away from western concepts of creating a showpiece, or making more room to cram things.

The observation card gives deck users the tools to find the right insights with their own ears and eyes by providing the steps to be in the right place at the right time with the right mindset to capture what is necessary to spark change.

Situation card – Documentary Conversation. When you can’t be with someone when they experience a product, make a decision, or opt in to an offer, a post action conversation can often provide the insights an innovation researcher needs. Imagine being with a mega Swiftie as they experience the Eros tour. Being in the crowd might give a sense of the elation fans experience seeing their favorite mega star perform, but if you need to know their purchase process when they got their tickets, you’ll be out of luck. A documentary conversation gives researchers the opportunity to ask the fan to go back in time to when they first heard about a tour, what they thought and felt, the conversations they had with friends, where they went for tour information, and how they strategized to get a ticket before they all sold out.

By empowering people to relive their experience with a complex and multi day or week process, researchers can often gather a broader range of stories and experiences than if they conduct an observation. The Documentary Conversation card gives users the steps to follow, questions to ask, and things to avoid to keep from stifling the person telling their story.

Situation Card – Real Needs. This card is all about working with others to understand what they go through to get things done. When they’ve developed extensive, rigorous pathways to get something done, it may be a location where you can innovate to create an easier, more efficient solution. The key is to observe and work with others to walk through and understand what they really need, not what they tell you they need. In fact, there are needs everywhere, but only some of them warrant real effort.

Example? Someone says, “I need a paper clip.” Another says “I need a post-it note.” That’s not a trigger to design a tie that conceals office supplies.

By working along side those with larger needs and quirky solutions – say, an elaborate spreadsheet to figure out what courses a college should offer in the next semester based on projected pass/fail rates from this semester plus previously completed courses by a cohort of students – you can identify what inputs go into making the decision. That can empower developers to create a system that contains the hard data as well as the soft inputs necessary to make good decisions to replace the manual labor with quick insights that can be adapted by departmental choice.

Experiential design and marketing research:

Situation card – Diagnostic ‘Shop Along.’ Many companies like to test their sales process by either inviting customers in to a pre-opening experience where they can shop the store and give feedback, or create multiple mock shopping environments to test various products and displays. In this card, researchers “shop along” with a customer by either accompanying them along the journey, or inviting them back in – this could be to your actual shop – to describe their journey and experience while making a selection.

As the researcher, you want to get into their thoughts, feelings, and emotions that emerged or accompanied them along the journey. Were they excited because it was the first day of a new launch? Were they casually stopping in, as they always do one afternoon every few weeks to browse? What struck them? What changed? What did they like or dislike?

Working with real customers is an opportunity to understand them by seeing through their world view, something that can provide insights that can become business shaping. This card gives you the tools and process to do just that.

Ideas card – Radical Repurposing. The gist of this card is that people find alternate uses for things all of the time. Ever stood on a chair to change a light bulb? Hopefully it was one with four legs and not an office chair that tilts and turns!

You get the idea. A glass for water is used to let spiders caught in the house out in the back garden. Something used for serious business can be repurposed as a game. A bicycle can be made of a new material – carbon fiber instead of aluminum, which itself replaced steel. So, innovations can occur from thinking “same thing, different use,” “same thing, different material,” “different thing, better outcome for same process” and so on. The Radical Repurposing card provides examples and pathways for anyone that might say, “That’s funny… I wonder if…” and come up with a radical solution.

Signals card – Get it? When creators are working on a new idea one of the most pressing questions is, “will our audience understand what it is we’ve made for them?” When working on something new, a big risk is the customer won’t understand the purpose, and thus won’t accept the change.

One of my favorite examples is the addition of a camera to a cell phone. The US market was the last to embrace the camera phone. The Japanese market was the first, and Europe came in between. Why? I studied Japanese and Chinese art history while in college and came up with a postulation. China and Japan never separated art, poetry and literature in the same way the West did. America, in particular, really enjoyed making its unique separate individualized objects – a book is a book, a painting a painting. A phone is a phone, and a camera a camera. In Japan, where historically a painting could have a poem written on it in elaborate calligraphy, and viewers could accept the beauty of the words, the style of the characters, and the quality of the image as enhancing one another, why wouldn’t they want to speak, text and share photos within a single technology?

Americans, on the other hand, had to be shown the value of such a combined technology. Texting itself was a slow adoption process.

This card gives you the tools to check with your audience for understanding. But what do you do if they don’t understand? Maybe there’s a different market that will. Maybe there’s a different path to introduction. Maybe there’s a new way to approach the innovation itself. This card leads the way.

Narrative and storytelling:

Situation card – Human Story Map. The purpose of this exercise is to imagine the journey someone goes through when they engage with the product, service, idea, category or experience you are working to innovate. Story maps can include the motivations and intentions carried by someone as they go through their day. A runner carries their shoes in their backpack to school, anticipating track practice in the afternoon. The entire process of packing, carrying, storing, cleaning, displaying, and signaling their affiliation can be a part of your innovation journey.

The story map card shows ways to identify a participant’s goal and larger need, along with the activities, tasks, details, options and so on that influence or impact their behavior around the subject you are working on. Each step along a journey can have one or more theme in each category. Writers of the journey can then ask questions of themselves that can then become questions of their target audience, or questions for development exploration. By joining the flow of the participant, researchers can see possibility within the context of their idea within a synthesized ‘real’ world.

Ideas card – 10-Star Experience. In my previous career in higher education we set a vision to provide a “Ritz-Carlton” experience for students. The concept is the same as the 10-Star Experience card in Innovation Tactics. The hotel is famous for giving each employee a budget to solve customer problems – when they see a problem, they are empowered to fix it, within their allotted resources.
Not every innovation scenario fits the hotel model of problem solving, but the idea of generating a 10-star experience can be retained, whether you are designing packaging for a new iced tea, creating a training program, or developing a new technological device you hope others will adopt. This card in the Innovation Tactics deck functions in a similar way to the human story map described above, but instead of trying to describe the world as it is and the function of your idea, the goal is to identify ways to outperform expectations, and more importantly, to find a way to catch potential failures of your standard as they are about to happen. Ultimately, this card can serve as a channel for continuous process improvement when it is used again and again to learn from real experiences and to solve and resolve scenarios so they result in better outcomes.

Focus card – Multiverse map. This is one card I wish had a stronger introduction. It focuses on identifying how your customer will use your innovation given the best and worst universes possible.

In storytelling, a multiverse is a framework that allows a franchise to develop many variations of a story. What if Superman were evil instead of good? What if he were weak instead of strong? What if he was willing to negotiate instead of strident in his sense of right and wrong? Superheroes are a perfect match for this kind of storytelling, because at their core, these heroes are about exploring moral and ethical practices framed large. The changes in characterization reframe the core questions and allow readers/viewers to go on numerous journeys as they explore various worlds and universes that in fact, revolve around the same core questions and ideas.

Products, services and ideas are no different. What if sharing a soda with friends really does bring people together? That’s one possibility. Another is that the sharing of soda with a security officer blatantly disregards power structures that empower some groups and disempower others. But there are plenty of universes in between. Maybe they just give us a sugar rush fore a brief period and send us to the dentist to fill a cavity down the road.

When we follow the multiverse map card to its natural conclusion, we can start to see the multitude of journeys, good, bad and indifferent that others can follow with the things we have created. By understanding the multiple journeys we can look for ways to better integrate what we create into other’s lives in meaningful and lasting ways.

Teamwork

Situation Card – Task Landscape. When you are thinking about people interacting with your innovation subject, you have a real opportunity when you deep dive on the tasks required to engage in the space. What are the tasks? Who deals with them? Smoothies sound great, but you use a knife, cutting board, blender, cups, measuring cups and spoons… Someone has to do the work, then someone has to clean up. An innovation in this space could be a more powerful blender – we’ve all seen that solution on YouTube. But it could also be a simplified way of measuring and processing ingredients. It could also be a set of tools that fit together in a way that allows them to self clean.

The card provides a process for evaluating existing tasks and solutions. Where there are tasks but few clear solution pathways, you might discover your opportunity.

Ideas Card – Shaping Trios. This is a teamwork exercise focused on working cross-functionally. Are you working to innovate in a school setting? Creating teams of three that include one teacher, one student and one administrator might just be the ticket! By getting people in different roles to work on a challenge together allows the team to see the challenge from multiple perspectives.

Why three? because it’s an uneven number, so voting will always have a unanimous or uneven split. Also, because if you jump to the next uneven number, five, it’s easy for people to start dropping responsibility – someone else will pick it up.

When you have multiple groups of three working on the same challenge, you generate many ideas quickly, diversifying the number of options to explore. The goal is not to complete an innovation, but to discover opportunity. By doing this activity regularly, say once a week, month or every quarter, depending on how involved you are in pushing innovation, you activate a larger portion of your team around the idea that innovation can be part of their regular activities and way of thinking.

Your teams work in short bursts to come up with ideas and potential avenues for exploration. That way it stays energized. Follow the steps on the card and don’t forget to document the work so you can carry it forward into prototyping and the next round of trio bursts to demonstrate your organization’s commitment to innovation and change.

Ideas card – Snowmobiling. The processes on the snowmobiling card are a great next step after shaping trios or in collaboration with the “radical repurposing” card. The idea of this card is that a “snowmobile” is skis plus a motor plus treads plus a seat plus a handlebar. A jet ski is a snowmobile that floats – not quite, but you get the idea. Many things in our world are actually mashups of other existing bits of engineering and technology. Sifting through related ideas and tertiary products can help your team imagine mashups that can be useful solutions for customers in your space.

Each card in the deck has prompts for thinking, steps to execute, processes to employ, and sometimes a suggested timeline where appropriate. With 56 cards in the deck, you’ve got lightning in a bottle. The descriptions above are just a few examples of how the tools included in the cards can empower your team to innovate, no matter what industry you are in.

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