When developing a new innovative product or program or process the tricky question is when to get the stakeholders involved. (By stake holders I mean those that might be affected by your new innovation in some way. For a product it could be the end user or the distributer, for a program it could be the audience and for a process it could be those that will be managing or participating in the new process.)
The old way of innovating would have been to do all the work based on your research and assumptions to bring a finished product to the market. If you were wrong and the stake holders didn’t like it there was a big crash and failure was costly. But that is the old and busted way!!
The new way is to involve stakeholders early on in the creation of the innovation so that their their buy in at the end is not an issue, since they have helped create the product. Sometimes, its easy to forget that even though the research is the biggest part of the innovation idea it is not the most important. The most important part of the process of innovation is the final vote of the stakeholder. If they don’t like it, it’s a flop.
So, the question still remains, when do you involve the stake holder? You are probably not going to like the answer because there is no perfect time other than, it is better too early than too late. Most stake holders don’t really want to be included in the exhaustive research part but just about all of them will have an opinion. So, ask them how you can improve what you have already come up with and take it to heart or you might not get the vote you are looking for.
The old way of innovating would have been to do all the work based on your research and assumptions to bring a finished product to the market. If you were wrong and the stake holders didn’t like it there was a big crash and failure was costly. But that is the old and busted way!!
The new way is to involve stakeholders early on in the creation of the innovation so that their their buy in at the end is not an issue, since they have helped create the product. Sometimes, its easy to forget that even though the research is the biggest part of the innovation idea it is not the most important. The most important part of the process of innovation is the final vote of the stakeholder. If they don’t like it, it’s a flop.
So, the question still remains, when do you involve the stake holder? You are probably not going to like the answer because there is no perfect time other than, it is better too early than too late. Most stake holders don’t really want to be included in the exhaustive research part but just about all of them will have an opinion. So, ask them how you can improve what you have already come up with and take it to heart or you might not get the vote you are looking for.
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