Innovator's Playbook How to Create Great Products, Services and Experiences that Your Customers Will Love

Take a Design-led Approach to Innovation

Innovation drives growth in organisations and entire economies. Yet innovation is hard, risky and rarely successful. Most innovations and startups fail because of a lack of focus on the front end of the innovation process where customer needs are researched, insights are distilled, solutions are ideated, prototyped and tested and business models are shaped. But innovation doesn?t have to be this way.

In Innovator?s Playbook, author and leading Design Thinking expert Nathan Baird shares his 20 years of hands-on experience, tools and methods for developing a winning customer-centric approach to innovation.

This book will teach you how to apply the design thinking method to innovation and help you to innovate better with five practical and proven stages:

1. Build the right team for innovation.

2. Better understand your customer through empathy.

3. Distill and refine customer-centric needs and insights.

4. Unleash your team?s creativity to create fresh new ideas

to address customer needs.

5. Experiment and validate desirable, feasible and viable solutions.

Innovator?s Playbook helps entrepreneurs, corporate teams, startups and leaders across all levels to use design-led methodologies for start-to-finish innovation success.

My Journey of Discovery to Innovation Flow vii

What’s all this noise about design? xv

Stage 1 Get Started 2

Stage 2 Discover 26

Stage 3 Distill insights 54

Stage 4a Ideate: Incubate & create 86

Stage 4b Ideate: Idea generation workshops 108

Stage 5a Experiment: Desirability 138

Stage 5b Experiment: Feasibility and viability 156

Over to you — your journey to innovation flow 191

About the author 197

Index 199

Nathan Baird is an internationally experienced innovation consultant based in Sydney. In his 21 years experience in business Nathan has worked both client side and consultancy side, across most industries and continents. He founded and led innovation and culture firm Methodry. He has also previously acted as a Consulting Program Director for UTS, working with their Business School, Design Innovation & Research Centre and Innovation & Creative Intelligence Unit.