The Inclusive Innovation Playbook

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How To Guides

Establishing Principles

Define Your Guiding Principles for inclusive innovation

There are many

benefits of inclusive innovation⁠

. Whilst key drivers for change vary across organisations, creating inclusive products and services always requires intentional effort and a holistic approach.

Fundamental first steps in innovating inclusively are to:

Know your why: Understand the drivers for inclusive innovation that are most pertinent for your organisation and connect this to your key mission.

Define your principles: These will serve as a guiding framework to help people understand what innovating inclusively means for your organisation. They help with decision-making and action, providing clarity and alignment across teams and stakeholders. It helps set expectations, establish a common understanding, and ensure consistency in approach, ultimately fostering accountability and driving towards shared goals.

Know Your ‘Why’

A key first step is to define what Inclusive Innovation means for your organisation.

This requires to you consider your mission and vision through a diversity and inclusion lens to understand why innovating inclusively really matters.

This means answering a number of key questions.

⁠

Start with why. Why do DE&I matter for your mission? What social impact do you want to have? What harm could you cause? Why is serving marginalised groups important for you? What are the consequences of not meeting diverse needs?

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By connecting to your ‘why’ and exploring these questions you can identify the drivers for inclusive innovation most pertinent to you.

Use the

Business Case for Change⁠

page to identify the drivers most pertinent for your organisation.

Understand how inclusive innovation connects to your organisation’s mission, vision and values. Know how it supports your product strategy. Know why it should be prioritised and the benefits it will bring.

Define your why.

Communicate it, and repeat, until it becomes truly embedded.

Principles for Inclusive Innovation

Once people understand why innovating inclusively matters, they will look to understand what is expected of them or how they can do it. This is where a set of inclusive innovation principles can help to align expectations and provide direction.

There are five key principles that will help to steer your innovation efforts towards inclusivity.

Use these as inspiration to define a set of inclusive innovation principles that are meaningful for the context of your organisation.

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One size doesn't fit all

If you only build for the dominant majority, you create exclusion.

Recognise that individuals and communities have diverse needs, experiences, and perspectives. Embrace the understanding that solutions should be tailored and adaptable to meet the specific requirements of different people, taking into account their unique identities, backgrounds, and circumstances.

Challenge inequity

If you are not actively challenging systemic inequity, you are probably contributing to it.

Acknowledge and actively work to dismantle the systemic biases and barriers that contribute to inequities. Advocate for fairness, justice, and equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of their race, gender, socioeconomic status, abilities, or other characteristics. Addressing inequity requires a commitment to creating inclusive systems and policies that promote equal access and outcomes.

Build with, not for

If you don’t include your target audience, you will fail to address their real needs and aspirations.

Involve and empower individuals and communities who are directly affected by a problem or innovation in the design and decision-making processes. Collaborate with them as partners rather than simply designing solutions for them. By embracing co-creation and inclusion, we ensure that diverse voices and perspectives are heard, and solutions are more relevant, effective, and sustainable. This means genuinely valuing lived experience, and not just professional expertise.

Empathise to empower everyone

If you don’t empathise, you will limit your collective potential as you won’t deeply understand what people really need.

Foster a deep understanding and empathy for the experiences, challenges, and aspirations of both your users and team members. Pay particular attention to those from historically underserved or marginalised groups. By recognising and valuing their lived experiences, you can design solutions that empower and uplift everyone. Empathy allows us to break down barriers, bridge divides, and create inclusive environments where everyone can thrive.

Be accountable for impact

If you are not intentional about mitigating harm, your solutions may have unintended negative consequences.

Take responsibility for the outcomes and consequences of your actions and innovations, regardless of your intensions. Exclusion results from both unintentional and intentional design decisions. Already marginalised and disadvantaged groups are often disproportionally negatively impacted.

Often innovation teams are focused on first-order thinking, which only considers the direct and immediate problem the innovation is designed to address. Second-order thinking encourages questions such as “and then what?” to consider wider implications of the potential impact the innovation could have, as well as those indirectly affected.

Strive for positive and sustainable impact by continuously evaluating and monitoring the effects of your work on individuals, communities, and society as a whole. Inclusive innovation goes beyond good intentions. Everyone has a responsibility to prevent and mitigate harm.

These principles form a foundation for inclusive innovation, guiding you towards solutions that are responsive, equitable, empowering, and accountable to the diverse needs of people and communities.

Guiding Your Team

In order to implement and scale inclusive innovation practices your team will need guidance and support. You’ll need to foster an inclusive culture where everyone understands their role in driving inclusive innovation and holds themselves accountable for their contributions.This needs to be embedded through training, processes and objective setting.

In order to create clarity, alignment and set clear expectations you’ll need to do the following:

Define Your Own Why: Start by clarifying your purpose and why inclusive innovation matters to your team. Establish a shared understanding of the impact you aim to create and the values that drive your work.

Establish Your Principles: Develop a set of guiding principles that outline how you will approach inclusive innovation. These principles should reflect your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and serve as a compass for decision-making throughout the innovation process.

Create guidance: Create a framework and supporting guidance to map out the processes, practices and approach that is expected of people involved in innovation. This might include high level guidance as well as more detailed drill downs into specific areas such as:

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Inclusive Language⁠

: Provide guidance on the use of inclusive language to ensure that your team communicates in a way that respects and includes all individuals. Encourage the use of gender-neutral language, avoid assumptions, and promote inclusive terminology that recognizes diverse identities and experiences.

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Inclusive Data Collection⁠

: Outline the importance of inclusive data collection practices. Emphasise the need to gather diverse and representative data to ensure that your innovation efforts consider the needs, experiences, and perspectives of all users. Provide guidance on ethical data collection, privacy considerations, and data analysis that avoids bias.

Embrace discomfort

Talking about diversity and inclusion isn’t always easy or comfortable. However, to create inclusive solutions it is necessary. It can bring up guilt or shame. It can cause deep discomfort. People can remain silent for fear of saying the wrong thing. It is critical to create safe spaces to allow for uncomfortable conversations and to ask difficult questions. Without this, progress will never be made.