£

What is the innovation framework?

Innovation can be an intimidating word. It doesn't need to be. Here's a quick explanation of what it means at Blood Cancer UK.

At Blood Cancer UK innovation is about developing outstanding products and services which most effectively get us to our objective of beating blood cancer.

This framework gives you the tools to do that. The approach we take to innovation is based design thinking and incorporates the principles of both UX and Service design. The technique focusses on properly understanding our audience's needs and working with them to iteratively develop solutions, testing at each stage.

The Innovation Framework, based on the Design Council's double diamond.

The Blood Cancer UK innovation framework

i

There are four stages to developing products and services within our innovation framework, which you will see on the landing page. The stages are:

  1. Discover. The first phase any innovation project is to ensure that you completely understand what user needs are, both internally and externally.
  2. Define. At this stage, you bring your research findings together to form insights - these will guide the rest of your project.
  3. Develop. Once you have made sense of your insights, it's time to generate loads of ideas.
  4. Deliver. Finally, when you've whittled down to just a few ideas, it's time to build prototypes, test them, pilot your solution, evaluate it and then iterate.

This resource provides you with both a step by step guide, plus the tools you need to run innovation projects within your team, ensuring that people affected by blood cancer are involved at all stages of the process.

The fast-track framework

Where possible you should approach the development of products and services with rigour and advance planning, ensuring you’re capturing all the user needs and feedback you need to ensure your product or service will be effective when it’s launched.

There are of course instances where an opportunity arises or the landscape shifts quickly, which means that speed of development is essential to success.

Where you have less than 4 weeks to launch your project, you can still follow the framework outline, but by using the quickest techniques, you should be able to move through the process in a matter of days using this fast-track framework.