3 Experimental Toolboxes
Summer 2018
Exploration
What does your team do?
Tools to help collaboratively visualise how an open innovation team works.
Explanation
Why does your team do?
Tools to help map the important action an open innovation team takes.
EvaluationBeta
Where is the value?
Tools to help develop meaningful evaluation measures for an open innovation team.
The Idea
Explore and explain a team's effective expert practice
Working with the Cabinet Office's Open Innovation Team, Lancaster University researchers co-designed tools for unpacking and analysing open innovation work.
The Context
High-paced open innovation in UK policy making
The Open Innovation Team scope and facilitate collaborations in policy making between academic experts and the UK government.
Our Process
Visualising value collaboratively
Exploration
A timeline of team activity
Work together to build a timeline of team activity over the past year (or month).
In Context
In Context
The OIT mapped 35 intents in about 30 minutes. These ranged in scope from ongoing collabroations with government bodies to sprint inititives or communications work.
Adding detail
Collaboratively enhance the timeline by mapping the people, documents, spaces and key moments.
In Context
The team captured over a hundred individuals and artefacts for their timeline. This revealed their growing network and the tools they use to expand it.
Finding common process
Based on the factual timeline, agree on common stages and phases of work.
In Context
For the Open Innovation Team, distinct phases of Landscaping, Scoping and Engagemenet emereged.
Explanation
Creating a framework
Working from identification of common elements that captures the range of a team’s work, create a loose framework that broadly represents to process of your team's work
In Context
The OIT's framework defined four basic stages of work, landscaping, to scoping, engaging and finally the active building of collaborations.
Mapping action
Using the framework as a common frame of reference, map examples of the team's action against the framework.
In Context
For the OIT this surfaced detailed descriptions of the team's work across multiple initiatives.
Finding unique value
Collaboratively analysing the team's actions (and connections between them) will draw out unique the value that the team generates.
In Context
The OIT developed new articulations of what team members do, and of the team's action as a whole.
EvaluationBeta
New terms
Based on the Exploratory and Explanatory toolpacks, propose and test new evaluation markers for team's performance.
In Context
This work is in progress with the OIT. Informed by the findings generated by toolpacks 1 and 2, we are working to develop digital measures of network-building and collaboration facilitation.
Download the Toolpacks
Create your own open innovation valuation process
Guidance
Tools
Download
Toolpack 1
Exploration
  • Toolbox overview
  • How-to guidelines
  • Slide Deck
  • Individual perspectives
  • Timeline skeleton
  • Lens: People
  • Lens: Things
  • Lens: Stories
Toolpack 2
Explanation
  • Toolbox overview
  • How-to guidelines
  • Slide Deck
  • Process framework templates
  • Courses of Action
  • Analysing Action
Toolpack 3
EvaluationBeta
  • Toolbox overview
  • How-to guidelines
  • New Dictionary
Select above
Licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
Research
Bridging Management and Collaborative Design
What we're interested in
The value in open innovation
New approaches to innovation are producing brand new kinds of value in business and in the public sector. Open innovation and new form of entrepreneurship disrupt traditional models of intellectual property and in turn the value they produce for stakeholders. We want to understand how this value can be understood, how it takes shape and how it can be captured and articulated.
Evaluation of open innovation initiatives
Open innovation initiatives can struggle to become embedded into organisations because of the difficulty in legitimising their performance through robust evaluation. The complexities of widely distributed value capture, linked to multiple agendas and evolving entrepreneurial practices, present real challenges. We support open innovators through engaged research and collaborative evaluation approaches.
Interdisciplinary action
We bring together expertise from Management Practices, Accounting, Design Research and Entrepreneurship.
  • Management Practices – the routine, recursive activities performed to organise and coordinate ‘getting work done through people.
  • Collaborative Design – the means to interrogate and reshape real-world practice.
  • Entrepreneurship – how individuals build systems and teams to discover, evaluate and exploit opportunities.
  • Performance management - how we understand and evaluate organisations and their systems of accountability.
We have carried out in-depth collaborative studies in other Open Innovation settings, including the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst.
Outputs & Publications
Reports, Academic Papers
Cabinet Office Evaluation Report
The Open Innovation Team: An Independent Evaluation of a Cabinet Office Initiative
Ford & Mason (February 2019)
Journal Paper
Managing to make markets: Marketization and the conceptualization work of strategic nets in the life science sector
Mason, Friesl & Ford - Industrial Marketing Management (2017) 67.
Journal Paper
Markets under the Microscope: Making Scientific Discoveries Valuable through Choreographed Contestations
Mason, Friesl & Ford - Journal of Management Studies. (2018).
Conference Paper
Realising the value of open innovation in policy making: Equipping entrepreneurs for valuation work
Whitham, Pérez, Mason, Ford - EAD 2019, forthcoming
ICAEW Report
Business performance management: When not to measure
Ford
Team
Professor Katy Mason
Professor of Markets & Management Practice, Lancaster University, and Chair of BAM, and has published her engaged research in leading journals including Journal of Management Studies, Organisation Studies, Long Range Planning, Marketing Theory and Industrial Marketing Management.
Dr Roger Whitham
Designer and lecturer based at ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University. His research centres on collaborative interactions than span distinct contexts, technologies, sectors and scales; explored through co-design, tools and visualisation.
Dr Chris Ford FCA
Lecturer in Accounting and Management at Lancaster University. His research looks at the performance management of innovation ecosystems, spanning contexts including bioscience, global telecoms, policy innovation, and regional economic strategy.
David Pérez
PhD Design student at Lancaster University. His research interest centres on the relationships of design and social entrepreneurship. He works in co-design and creative engagement projects designing workshops, making tools, visualising and supporting facilitation activities.
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