CUBE Side #1 – Calibrates Your Innovation Quest
CUBE Side #1 – Calibrates Your Innovation Quest.
Focuses innovation goals
Clarifies boundaries & hurdles
Identifies all domain stakeholders
Predicts forces that will impact the innovation
(marketplace, technology & competitive environment)
Too many times project teams spend valuable man hours developing a solution that they later find is wasteful or even undoable for different areas of the business. A design team, for instance, will develop a component that manufacturing currently does not have the man power, experience, or equipment to produce. Situations like this cause unnecessary waste inside your company by causing constant “Fire Fighting” to fix the issues.
Side 1 of the CUBE will systematically get all stakeholders from each domain of your organization involved in the project from the beginning. This will allow all stakeholders of the project to be heard and make their voice a part of the solution and not part of the problem later. The CUBE will get each stakeholder agreeing and focusing on a common goal from the start.
The CUBE will get each stakeholder involved in identifying the forces of change that will affect the project in the future. Changes in the market, available technologies, and your competition can act as a very disruptive force against the life cycle of your product, process, or service. Identifying these forces of change from the beginning will ensure your product can adapt quickly or, even better, not need to adapt at all.
Stakeholders will identify and agree on the boundaries of the project from the start. This will prevent waste by keeping the team focused on innovations that are within the scope of the accepted boundaries set by the organization.
Side 1 of the CUBE will also get input from each stakeholder as to problems or hurdles that they may run into. In the example above, a manufacturing floor lacking experience to produce a new product can begin to train personnel immediately. Stakeholders will use Side 1 to identify preset boundaries which are truly only hurdles and can begin working on ways to get around those hurdles.
By accomplishing all of the steps on side 1 of the CUBE, your project team will have systematically involved all of the stakeholders required to practice “fire prevention” instead of “fire fighting”, keeping each stakeholder focused on a common goal while being made aware of the disruptive forces the team will face.