The Outcome-Based Collaborative Brainstorming of Strategic Service Design

Abstract

During the phases of an innovation lifecycle, from the value proposition to realization, is about brainstorming especially in its early phases. The success of the brainstorming process depends on many factors, the diversity of the team members, the boundary spanning capability, the ability of foreseeing the insight of risks in the future, etc. On the other hand, the innovation is also a collaborating process of exploring the differentiating value propositions from the target competitors or the benchmark artifacts in the market; the outcomes must be clear to kickoff the next step of the initiative. How to encourage the team members to make their best efforts to contribute their thoughts and ideas and come out with a rational decision about the resolution with consensus is the key to the successful brainstorming process. This paper presents a novel brainstorming process, including the roles, the responsibilities, the facilitating, the workflow, and the theories behind, for service design and got satisfied results from the empirical cases that were government-funded service projects.

1 Introduction

Nowadays the most effective approach of differentiating against the business rivals is through innovation (Aghion et al. 2014). The challenges of innovation are from various perspectives: (1) how to create a culture that encourages creativity and innovation (Alamsyah and Yerki 2015); (2) how to develop the winning ideas that are customer-centered; (3) how to create a feasible action plan to boost the breakthrough of products and services; (4) how to manage these under developing ideas to be an asset for further inspiration; (5) how to let the top management support these ideas through involvement and understanding; and (6) how to effectively communicate the ideas with the functional departments (Baker 2015). Apparently, the innovation is the synergy of those outcomes that generated by the brainstorming process, thus the quality of the brainstorming will determine the impact of the innovation.

The essence of innovation is to identify the competitive services against rivals based on the firm’s resources which are not easy to mimic and to replicate. But the firms are always short of some resources for their initiatives, apply the Open Innovation Model—collaborating with the complementary partners to mature a new product or service–seems to be the answer of expediting the time-to-market. The competitive services have three supporting pillars (Qiu 2014): (1) science—giving the support from the theory or the facts to the innovation; (2) management—effectively and efficiently using the resources to develop and realize the innovation; and (3) engineering—realizing the innovative service products or business model. The innovation is a holistic thinking model mixed with the perspectives of (Ho 2014): (1) social—how customers can be benefited and how our society will be influenced from the innovative services; (2) technology—how technologies will be applied, integrated, and derived to substantiate the innovation; (3) economic—how the innovative services will improve the firm’s financial status and lead the whole value chain to grow; and (4) policy—the tactics of the firm to promote the innovative services or the principles of sustaining them. The competitive services are also the target—such as building the ecosystem, creating a new business model, designing a new product or service, and enhancing the firm’s core competence—of the strategy of the innovation, it must begin with the scanning against the current situation as the baseline—such as the capability of the firm, the SWOT of products and services in the market, and set a series of sequencing plans or initiatives—such as marketing the value propositions, designing the excellent services and selling them—to mitigate the gap to success (Simon et al. 2014) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

The service science approach of innovation

This paper aims to answer that how to make people contribute their best knowledge, experiences, and ideas to stimulate the innovation effectively. The common brainstorming of thinking may include: (1) time frames—such as waiting for another technology or market to be more mature to accept the innovation, different ones might change the essence of the issue; (2) locations—such as deployed the innovation in the city or the rural, different ones would bring broader views about the issue; (3) attributes—such as consumed the services by genders or ages, different ones could be more thoughtful to the solution; (4) roles—such as from the service buyer or the user’s perspective, different ones could change the way of design; and (5) context—such as applying the same innovation on various contexts, different ones might appreciate the innovation more and shorten the time-to-market. Therefore, the diversity of the brainstorming team will help the innovation cover more aforementioned perspectives. The competitive services, the target, are the outcome of the brainstorming; without the outcome which should meet the expectation of the executives will be a kind of resource waste, a deadweight loss of organizational activities, certainly cannot expect it will lead to any innovation.

2 The Outcome-Based Brainstorming Process

The major issue of brainstorming is the cost of communication, especially when its outcome does not meet the expectation of the executive. The reasons why the outcome is not effective and satisfied are: (1) the executive did not disclose the expected outcome specifically; (2) the executive did not play any part of the brainstorming; (3) the team members did not have the equal opportunity of sharing the idea; (4) there was no one leading the discussion effectively; (5) the arguments either were not based on the solid ground nor had a balanced perspective; (6) the discussion did not reach the consensus; (7) the discussion ended up with a list of tangled view points but no tangible outcome; (8) the discussion was conducted under a unequal influence or imbalanced power atmosphere; (9) some details of the discussion including possible value points were trimmed off due to lacking of sufficient notes; and (10) others such as incompetent team members who just could not deliver the outcome.

To improve the brainstorming, this paper presents a novel approach to encourage the team members to contribute their thoughts more efficiently by using the similar form of workshop (Simons et al. 2015). First, to lower down the insufficient communication, a big team needs to break into smaller groups, and reorganizes each group based on the roles and their responsibilities during the brainstorming as illustrated in the Table 1. There are two categories of roles; each role is associated with a nickname to emphasize its characteristics. The first category includes the Executive—its nickname is the Emperor making the final judgment calls on the direction of the further brainstorming, explicitly expresses the expectations and the goals from the brainstorming—and the Facilitator—its nickname is the Judge Dredd (borrowed from a famous comic and movie character) mastering the theme, guides the brainstorming process and inspires the groups’ creativeness, while the other one contains the roles: (1) Presenter—its nickname is the Silverback, leads the discussion and manages the direction of value propositions; (2) Informant—its nickname is the Eagle overseeing the big picture, giving the supporting information to the proposition; (3) Secretary—its nickname is the Lioness hunting the prey, keeps records of the details of threads; (4) Writer—its nickname is the Peacock showing off the value points, distils the threads into valuable points; and (5) Challenger—its nickname is the Wild Duck always thinking out of the box, works as a critique role to maintain the quality of the discussion, in a group.

Table 1. The roles and their responsibilities

For better result from the brainstorming, the Fig. 2 illustrates the ideal layout of the discussion room (Pavelin et al. 2014); there are long-bench tables for the groups named as Tn, n is the identification of the group; each table equips with a big screen or a projector for easy communication; the notation of RnA represents the Silverback, the alpha male of the herd of gorillas, the rest are the other roles in the group. In the center of the layout is the table where the Emperor and the Judge Dredd work at. The round table is also acted as the commanding office during the brainstorming.

Fig. 2.

The ideal layout for brainstorming

As Fig. 3 illustrated, in the beginning, the Emperor gives the goals and the expectations from the coming brainstorming to all participants. The Judge Dredd explains how the brainstorming will be conducted to all, asks group members to introduce themselves about their expertise and the background respectively, finally gives a well-known case to save time in understanding the issues, as an exercise to let the participants be familiar with the brainstorming process. This simulation is essential to the success of the latter brainstorming in the real theme; therefore, if time permits, let the group members play as many roles as possible. In many occasions, the Judge Dredd also usually plays the domain expert on that problem theme to disclose the potential issues, the background understanding about the issues, and the possible directions about the solution of the issues.

Fig. 3.

The preparation for brainstorming

3 The Empirical Cases of Brainstorming

There were three selected empirical cases presented in this paper, applying the aforementioned brainstorming method for service design: (A) service innovation—the hybrid team members came from various research centers who intended to initiate a joint-project by leveraging their core competencies; (B) business model exploration—a large number of executives came from the selected small and medium business were looking for the possibility of using the Big Data to explore their new business opportunities and to improve the existing business efficiency; and (C) extending knowledge—the graduate management school students from different nations learned what the Smart Factory is and discussed the issues about it from various perspectives.

From the empirical cases, the proposed brainstorming method reached a promising result especially in the big diverse team by breaking them into smaller groups. This is a critical task to the success of the brainstorming; the grouping criteria should be based on the members who are complementary in: (1) business (2) competence and (3) personality. For better result, interviewing all attendees and categorizing their characteristics is a good practice. Usually it is not easy to identify who are appropriate to play the Silverback and the Wild Duck roles. However, the proposed brainstorming method can also be a leadership and critique training; the group members can take turns to play all the roles for different topics if the brainstorming time is long enough.

The Judge Dredd must have adequate domain knowledge and experiences so that he/she can guide and lead the discussion toward the goal set by the Emperor and make his/her best efforts to reach the expected outcome with consensus. The Eagle requires to have a strong knowledge network in which can be effectively used in backing up the propositions. The Lioness uses a mind-map like tool to keep discussion threads efficiently in details; when a discussion is warm, the group might need to slow down the discussion to give more time in keeping these threads if there is no handy tool in place. The Peacock consolidates and re-organizes these discussion threads into concise bulletins and drafts them on the whitepaper to let the Silverback elaborate the value points easily. How to assign proper tasks as a CEO and to lead the discussion smoothly as the stimulus are the major challenges to the Silverback.

The Silverbacks can learn the skills from each other during the brainstorming. The Wild Duck does not join the discussion, but observes the discussion where it goes wrong and reminds the team to keep the track on the issues. If all groups have the same goal of outcome, then the Wild Duck requires to switch over to other groups for a small period of time and brings back the valuable points to the belonging group. The Silverback takes into account these points to lead addition rounds of discussion to see if there is anything can be used in improving the group value proposition.

The time management for the whole brainstorming process is another critical task; if the discussion time is too short, the propositions may be too shallow to conclude a solid outcome; otherwise the brainstorming will exhaust the enthusiasm and the energy of the members; the effect will be deflated for a marathon brain-melting discussion. The Judge Dredd needs to have a draft plan in mind about how many issues or phases can be discussed within the brainstorming period and how long it takes for each issue or phase.

Finally, the Judge Dredd asks all groups’ Silverbacks to articulate their ideas, why they think this way about the issues, and taking the challenges from other group members respectively. The challenged group works as a team to keep the questions and the discussion threads, finding the evidences that can back up the proposed view points, and eventually refine them based on the new coming comments from others. Each participant has two votes to elect the best ideas among the other groups (voting for the belonging group was not permitted). If two groups have the same number of votes, re-vote against these two ideas until the best idea is elected.

The Judge Dredd gives a deep brief to the Emperor before he/she reviews all value propositions from the groups. The proper attitude of the Emperor should be to encourage the efforts that the groups had made instead of criticizing about the rough works after the brainstorming. Because the brainstorming is a continuous spiral-convergent process; identifying the feasible objectives from each brainstorming process will accumulate the synergy of outcomes. It is a good practice that incorporates with existing knowledge management system to solicit, capture, organize, disseminate, and reuse these outcomes as knowledge. This will expand the soliciting circle to other tacit contributors; such a knowledge-network eventually evolves into a value chain, a knowledge ecosystem (Table 2).

Table 2. Three empirical cases of the brainstorming

4 Conclusion

To make the innovation more effectively, it is not just about the talent of the members, but also about the cultural and atmospheric environment. Creative thinking is no longer an attribute that’s nice to have, but a critical competency for any organization seeking the excellency in business. If the brainstorming is not conducted properly, the whole session may become chaotic, divergent, results in nothing, and thus certainly viewed by the participants as a waste of time. Measuring the outcomes from the brainstorming is the necessary evil to ensure that all participants will reach the goal and meet the expectations with the consensus, that were set by the executives. This paper presents a practical framework for effective brainstorming; not just shooting for the feasible outcomes, but also improving the abilities—leadership (Herrmann and Felfe 2014), teamwork, dealing with conflicts, making fact-based arguments, learning from the peers—of staffs through the process. Such a framework will improve the quality of organizational culture, and most importantly, to transform the organization as the incubator of creativeness.