Innovation Workshops

You need concentrated creative time with the right people in the room. Distributed work hasn't cracked the problem. But you've run workshops before and the outputs gathered dust.

Innovation Workshops are structured sessions that bring diverse participants together to generate, develop, and evaluate ideas under skilled facilitation. You design each workshop around a specific objective — some explore problems, others generate solutions, others prototype and test.

The concentrated environment produces outcomes that distributed work often can't — the right combination of people, focus, and facilitation creates conditions where ideas build on each other in real time. But workshops are expensive: participants' time multiplied by preparation, travel, and opportunity cost. The unique value is that concentration and collision of perspectives.

Reach for one when a challenge genuinely warrants pulling people out of their regular work. It fails without implementation discipline — when post-workshop follow-through is absent, outputs become shelfware and the team learns that workshops are theatre, not work. Running another workshop to fix the problem the last workshop was supposed to fix is a pattern worth noticing.

Your next move: What happened to the output from your last innovation workshop — and if the answer is 'it's in a Miro board nobody opens', why are you about to run another one?

What it looked like for them

Chip Blankenship, GE Appliances, January 2013. GE's first FastWorks project was a high-end French door Monogram refrigerator. The approach was new for GE: a cross-functional team ran rapid iteration workshops with Eric Ries — the Lean Startup author — as trainer.

The team built and tested eight versions with customers. Customers rejected the first. By the fifth iteration, positive response emerged. The workshops weren't brainstorming sessions. They were structured build-test-learn cycles compressed into weeks rather than months.

The result: half the typical programme cost, twice the normal development speed, and a sales rate that ran at over two times the category average. The pilot's success led to hundreds of FastWorks programmes across GE.

Innovation workshops work when they produce a specific, testable output at the end of each session — not ideas on sticky notes but prototypes in customers' hands. Blankenship's team didn't workshop the concept. They workshopped the product, eight times, until customers said yes.