Team Alignment Through Ideation Workshops
In today’s market, successful businesses can’t rely on ad-hoc ideas or isolated departments. True innovation needs to be embedded into your company culture, which starts with aligning your team around shared business goals.
What is innovation training?
Innovation training involves aligning business teams and their development pipelines with specific business goals. Setting these clear goals and creating team cohesion encourages interdepartmental collaboration and avoids wasting time and resources. Plus, training workshops aim to give innovation teams the ability to make themselves self-sufficient; continuing innovation in future projects and keeping their businesses competitive and growing.
Innovation training is particularly valuable when your business is preparing for new product development, entering a new market, or needs to get independent teams working toward a shared strategy.
Can a single workshop shift growth strategy?
A Smallfry ideation workshop involves bringing together a team (ideally from a range of departments) to take part in guided brainstorming, analysing past data to figure out exactly what is needed to encourage organic business growth.
While one workshop can encourage design thinking and lay the groundwork for innovation success, we also offer ongoing support to help shape and determine your new product development (NPD) pipeline.
Case study 1: Marks & Spencer General Merchandise
When partnering with Smallfry, Marks & Spencer aimed to revitalise their general merchandise offering by embedding a more innovative, commercially focused approach across teams. We ran a series of high-energy ideation workshops designed to align departments and uncover actionable opportunities for growth.
“Smallfry’s approach to product innovation was very different. They were truly customer focused and invested in our growth. Excellent facilitation of workshops.”
– Simon Colbeck, Head of Innovation and Quality
By the end of the project, the M&S team had generated over 150 commercialised ideas ready to feed directly into their product development pipeline.
Case study 2: Salts Healthcare’s Confidence BE® range
When Salts Healthcare approached us at Smallfry, their goal was to redefine the experience for people with ostomy bags and deliver solutions that would truly improve lives. Our role was to uncover consumer insights and build a strategic foundation to guide the development of designs for their new range of ostomy products.
During the project, we ran focus group sessions with stoma patients and medical professionals, then fed insights into innovation workshops with the Salts Healthcare team. These included immersive “Day in the Life” workshops (helping the team understand the daily challenges of stoma patients) and ideation workshops where we brainstormed and identified critical goals before exploring concepts to solve them.
Since launching the Confidence BE® range, which smashed sales targets, Salts Healthcare have now recruited a dedicated innovation team; responsible for ensuring there is a continuous pipeline of innovation, guided by the co-created vision: “Caring, listening, and innovating to improve lives.”
What are the benefits of attending an ideation workshop?
- Determines clear business metrics, providing a new way to track ROI.
- Reduces the risk of wasting time and resources by focusing efforts effectively.
- Encourages inter-departmental collaboration to drive aligned innovation.
- Inspires innovation as a habit, keeping your business competitive.
- Supports long-term financial security through strategic thinking, ultimately creating organic business growth.
Want to explore how a workshop could align your team and fuel innovation?
Learn how a Smallfry ideation workshop could transform your innovation pipeline, as it has for Salts Healthcare and Marks & Spencer.
