Yesterday we held our first Innovation Cafe. It wasn’t just an excuse to hang out with colleagues, drink coffee and eat croissants (though that was lots of fun) - the plan was to get creative too and pool our collective brain power to think of some innovative ideas.

The cafe followed on from the CCH Innovation Idol. We had asked the company to vote on seven innovations that had been proposed by a range of CCH employees. The proposals were put up on our Sharepoint site and people had ten days to pick a favourite.

We announced the top three at the Innovation Cafe. I sent out an invite to the whole company and limited numbers to 25: 24 people came. After coffee and croissants we split into three groups (each with a facilitator) and each group spent 15 minutes brainstorming one of the ideas. Each group then moved to the next idea, looked at the results of the brain storming and spent 10 minutes refining the ideas. The groups then moved to the next idea and spent five minutes trying to establish the key opportunity or value proposition. The facilitators stayed with the same idea while the groups moved around and this ensured some consistency. It was effective to keep the groups moving both physically and mentally as it kept it interesting and pacey!

We wrapped the cafe up by voting on the one innovation we wanted to actively pursue and start researching more thoroughly and create a business case for. I found the whole event both stimulating and worthwhile and it was great that 24 people from across the company came along: we had someone from nearly every single department. With such an eclectic mix of people  we couldn’t fail to have an interesting and lively experience.

I really recommend putting on an innovation cafe. The combination of an informal setting ( we just used a common space at the office), tasty food and engaged attendees delivered ideal results: one innovative idea that has been pulled apart and put back together again by 24 different people and lots of full tummies!

Tags: Innovation

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.