IDEO U Alumni Coach Fellow
This was the picture taken when I visited IDEO’s office in San Francisco with Olivia (left) and Em (right). Thank both of them for inviting me and the great office tour there.
What is a good question to elicit innovation?
This is the question that many online learners asked me. In my opinion, there’s no definite answer for this one because it depends on who is the audience of your question and how much they know about the question that you address. My general rule for the structure of a good question is to add a user and a context interacting with that user in the question. Then, I would add some words that could inspire others. More importantly, I would start the question with How Might We, welcoming others opinion on my question. As to how to evaluate the effect of a good question, it should be able to elicit around 3 to 5 ideas from a participant in your group as you ask him/her the question. Don’t make it too narrow or too broad.
For example, …
- How might we leverage technology to help families feel safe and connected？
- Too broad. There are many ideas that can generated from this question.
- How might we design communications technologies that connect parents and children as they enter their house?
User: parents & their children Context: enter the house Direction: Commmunication Technology - It might be better to define the age range of parents and their childern
- How might we launch a campaign and app that make healthy eating cool for teens
- Too narrow. The only difference between the ideas would be the contents of the app. There are other possible solutions to make healthy eating cool
- How might we inspire teens around the topic of healthy eating?
- It’s okay to ask this question to help your group explore more about the topic. Gradually, you would come to a better question to elicit innovation.
My way of thinking toward innovation
When it comes to explore and define the problem, I would ask myself what, how and why is the problem in sequence.
Take what I’ve done in the project that help COPD patients monitor disease development for example,
- What is the problem:
- The hospital admission rate due to acute exacerbation is really high. On average, every COPD patient would have unexpected hospital admission 2~3 times in a year.
- How
- How COPD patients react to the acute exacerbation or even the symptoms before acute exacerbation?
- It turns out that most of COPD patients do nothing for the smaller symptoms. At certain point, those smaller symptoms would trigger acute exacerbation, which leads to hospital admission.
- Why
- Why do they do nothing?
- Sometimes, those smaller symptoms would disappear; Sometimes, they don’t.
- To prevent them from hospital admission, they need to learn how to judge their symptoms objectively. => Improve self-efficacy
With asking these 3 questions to myself, the emotional needs of the users would be discovered and those are the potential insights that lead to my innovation.