The core purpose of the Innovation Café (iCafe) is to encourage and empower people to innovate.
Purpose of the Innovation Café
In everyday organizational life, there are numerous daily opportunities for innovation.
Employees are often aware of these opportunities, choose to do nothing as they feel it is not their responsibility, or the thought of acting does not even cross their minds.
The opportunities lie there beneath the surface, and that is where they remain.
These opportunities are mostly minor (micro-innovations), but some can be large (macro-innovations).
It also does not help that managers provide no motivation, encouragement, or support to innovate at this level.
The idea of the iCafe is not only to give employees permission to innovate but to inform them that they do not necessarily need permission.
The iCafe helps empower people to act and fosters an innovative culture.
Knowledge Cafés
One of the Knowledge Café principles is that the outcomes of the Café are what individuals take away in their heads; often nothing is captured or documented.
Cafés rely on people to take away their thoughts and insights and to act on them as appropriate.
But of course, in reality, people are busy or lack motivation, and no explicit direct action results from a Café. This is not to say though that they are talking shops as personal insights and new knowledge get fed into future decision-making and ways of observing the world without the participant ever realizing. Conversation and thus the Cafés do change people in subtle ways of which they are unaware.
The iCafé is an adaptation of the Knowledge Café that unlike a regular Café focuses the participants on action.
The Innovation Café Process
The iCafé is based on the Knowledge Cafe process. It frequently brings together people from different departments to ensure a diversity of thought and that cross-silo issues are identified.
In an iCafé, three types of issues are likely to be raised:
- Issues that an individual participant can take away and address without any permission; its part of their job; within their circle of influence. They see the problem – they fix it.
- Issues that can be fixed by an individual but where permission is needed from their manager and maybe a small number of resources. This needs no agreement – the individual again leaves the iCafé and goes away and makes it happen.
- Issues that are the responsibility of other people or departments and/or require substantial corporate resources to address. Here the issues need to be raised to senior management for review and action.
The first two of these types of issues do not even need to be captured but simply left for the individuals to act on though in the interests of ensuring follow-through and demonstrating the value of the iCafé they should be captured in some way.
The Innovation Cafe Format
- Number of participants: typically 16 – 24 people
- Tables: Eight small round tables about 1 meter in diameter
- People per table: 3- 4 people per table – a maximum of 5 people
- Room: A small comfortable room with good acoustics; tables close together but the ability to form easily a circle of chairs
- Duration: 4 hours (longer than a normal Knowledge Café)
Process Summary
- Introduction to the iCafé concept (30 minutes)
- Description of the iCafé process (30 minutes)
- Setting the business context (30 minutes)
- The theme and question (30 minutes)
- Coffee break (15 minutes)
- Small group conversations (3 x 20 minutes= 60 minutes)
- Whole group conversation (45 minutes)
Total time: 3 – 4 hours
1. Introduction to the iCafé concept
The host explains the background to the iCafé and its purpose to the whole group. Time is given, for discussion and Q&A.
2. Description of the iCafé process
The detail of the iCafé process is explained to the whole group.
The point is made that the key objective of the iCafé is to identify business issues and responses to them and that there are several types of business issues: objectives, problems, opportunities, and risks.
- Objectives: the business objectives you are looking to achieve
- Problems: things that prevent you from achieving your objectives
- Risks: things that may go wrong or may surprise you if you do not pay attention to them
- Opportunities: new things that could change the playing field or result in greatly enhanced effectiveness
And that the questions, they should always be asking themselves are:
- Are we pursuing the right objectives; are our strategies appropriate?
- What are the problems that we face? What keeps us awake at night? What should be keeping us awake?
- What are the opportunities to do new things and do things in new ways?
- What are the risks or threats that we face?
Time is given, for discussion and Q&A.
3. Setting the business context
The whole group is reminded of the business context in which they operate. They are given 15 minutes or so at their tables to discuss the following question and then 15 minutes to share their thoughts with the whole group.
More time can be allowed if felt necessary.
What is the business purpose of the organization and your specific business unit or project team?
The idea is not to spend a lot of time on this but to remind people of the business purpose of their work. It may seem surprising, but often people are not aware of or totally forget their business purpose and only think in terms of their role or activity.
If they are “on the ball” – answers to these questions should flow off the tongue, and there should be little disagreement amongst the participants. If this is not the case, then a subsequent Café could be convened to focus on the business objectives and strategy. But even without agreement, the iCafé can still continue. If it is clear upfront that there is a lack of understanding of the business purpose, then a Café to focus on this might be a pre-requisite to the iCafé
4. The theme and question
The host and/or speakers now give the “seed talk” and pose the iCafé question to the whole group.
The question is usually action-oriented such as:
“What are the critical business issues and opportunites we face and what can each of us do right now either individually or together to respond to them?”
The question may be quite broad or more focused in some way depending on the desired outcome.
Other possible questions for the iCafe might be:
- What are the business issues we face and how do we best respond?
- What are the barriers to knowledge sharing and innovation within the organization and how do we overcome them?
- What problems do we face through a lack of information and knowledge?
- What business opportunities are we missing?
- What risks do we face as an organization – both internal and external?
Just one question is posed. But people are reminded it’s OK to go off-topic i.e. if they are discussing a problem and see an opportunity – it’s OK to discuss that. It’s an emergent process.
5. Small group conversations
The participants are asked to discuss the iCafé question in small groups.
This part of the process runs identically to a normal knowledge café where people get to move tables two or three times to take part if different conversations and like the Knowledge Café nothing is captured as a group, and there are no table leaders.
6. Whole group conversation
Finally, as in a normal Knowledge Café, the whole group comes together in a conversation circle to share and develop their insights.
This conversation takes place in two parts:
- a general sharing of ideas
- finally, the host goes around the circle and elicits feedback and planned actions from each individual
Turning Conversation into Action
During the small group conversations, the participants are encouraged to capture thoughts, ideas, actionable insights, etc. on paper. One option is to give them a small colorful notebook in which to do this to help encourage them and so the ideas are recorded in a place that is not easily lost or forgotten about.
As described above, there are two types of ideas: those they can action; those they cannot. The ones that they can action themselves – they do.
As part of a commitment to the iCafé, people agree to write a short document after the iCafé that summarizes what they have learned and the actions that they have taken on themselves.
These documents could be word documents; wiki documents, or blog posts but they need to be easily shareable and transparent – anyone should be able to see them if they wish. Giving everyone involved a personal blog may be a good approach.
Ideally, there should be at least one senior manager in the room – may be more – at the end of the Cafe in the conversation circle, people share their actionable insights.
The senior managers make notes of the actions that are for them to take away and action. They too write a short personal “commitment to action document.”
Review iCafés
Within two to three weeks of the initial iCafe, a second iCafe should be held. It should not be so soon that no progress has been made and not so long as to lose momentum. The format of this Café is different from the original.
People sit for the whole of the Café in a conversation circle.
Move around the circle and people (including managers) report back on their individual actions. It’s OK to have done nothing. No explicit pressure. Some things, take longer; they require reflection; discussion, and time to gestate.
Each person reports back on one action only, or they can pass. A brief discussion takes place on each action.
After this second iCafé others can be run at regular intervals.
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