The Inclusive Innovation Playbook

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The Inclusive Innovation Playbook

The Three P's of Inclusive Innovation

People - Practice - Product

Inclusive People

Inclusive Practices

Inclusive Products

People - Practice - Product

Inclusive innovation is the combination of diverse and inclusive people following inclusive practices, that result in inclusive and equitable products and services.

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Inclusive innovation requires 'Diverse & Inclusive People', 'Inclusive Practices' and 'Inclusive Products & Services'. All three are needed to avoid systemic exclusion, knowledge gaps and underserving customers.

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The Diversily 3Ps model can be used to help you:

Understand the key elements required to innovate inclusively.

Self assess to understand your organisations areas of strength and weakness.

Identify your priority areas of focus across your people, practices and products.

Adopting the model can help propel your inclusive innovation efforts forward and avoid:

Knowledge gaps which can result in poor decision making.

Underserving segments of your target audience, which can result in missed opportunities.

Excluding people or groups, which can result in unintentional harm.

You can use this holistic inclusive innovation model from Diversily to explore where your organisation is doing well, and where there are opportunities to do more.

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Contact us⁠

if you’d like an independent assessment to help you identify your strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Whilst diverse teams are critical, this is not enough to ensure you create inclusive experiences. You need education and resources (like this playbook!), and to embed inclusive practices, as well as to incorporate input from a diverse range of people, to create truly inclusive products, services and experiences.

Inclusive practices are not the end goal in themselves, but a means to achieving a more equitable outcome.

However, inclusive practices alone are also not enough to create inclusive products. Inclusive experiences don’t result from simply following inclusive practices. Unless diverse people are involved in the design process who are actively considering inclusion, you are unlikely to create truly inclusive experiences.

Inclusive innovation requires diverse and inclusive people adopting inclusive practices to intentionally create inclusive products and services.

Inclusive people

Without diverse or inclusive people, expect knowledge gaps to persist which result in poor decision making.

Inclusive innovation starts with people. This means:

Inclusive leadership: Tone is set from the top. Inclusive leaders will advocate for, prioritise and commit to inclusive innovation. They are role models for inclusive behaviour, they act as allies and they set the stage for others to shine. They create an environment of involvement, respect and connection – where the richness of ideas, backgrounds and perspectives are harnessed to create business value and impact.

Inclusive culture: An inclusive culture is essential for inclusive innovation. Inclusive cultures can radically improve employee retention and feelings of belonging, significantly reducing recurring talent acquisition costs. Additionally, a collective feeling of inclusion, ties teams closer together, improving communication, knowledge sharing, critical challenge and performance. It requires actively recruiting and hiring individuals from underrepresented groups and creating an environment where everyone can thrive. All team members need the skills, knowledge, and a sense of responsibility to create inclusive experiences for all.

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Diverse participation⁠

: To innovate inclusively it is vital to involve diverse individuals throughout the innovation process, from ideation to product development and launch. It's important to take a collaborative and participatory approach. Engage people of different ages, genders, backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities, and more, from within your organisation, customer base, and beyond, who reflect your target users.

Inclusive practices

Without inclusive practices embedded, you can be systematically excluding people or groups, which can result in unintentional harm.

Inclusive innovation requires inclusive practices, that determine the way in which you operate. This means taking an inclusive approach is standard procedure, rather than simply relying on the enthusiasm of any individual cheerleaders.

Cater for diversity: A foundational principle to innovate inclusively is to systematically think about the diversity of the people who might use your products and services. You need to consider diverse needs and perspectives at all stages of the innovation lifecycle. If you are only building for the dominant default majority, you are not innovating inclusively. Consider marginalised users and seek to understand how needs might differ across gender, culture, ability and other aspects of diversity.

Intentional inclusion: If you are not intentionally including, then you are likely to be unintentionally excluding. Being intentionally inclusive requires you to see the world through an inclusive lens. This means embedding inclusion into your practices and innovation activities, as standard. Look across your practices across the lifecycle to consider how you can take a more inclusive approach; from your research methods, agile ceremonies, and design practices to your communication and testing practices.

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Counter bias⁠

: To create equitable solutions it is vital to recognise and counter systemic oppression, discrimination and bias that prevent some people from accessing the same opportunties as others. This means reviewing your processes and practices to understand where bias may creep in, and putting in place measures to counter this.

Inclusive products

Without inclusive products you can under serve segments of your target audience, resulting in missed opportunities.

The ultimate goal of inclusive innovation is to create inclusive products, services, and experiences that are accessible, equitable and empowering for all users, regardless of their abilities, culture, personal characteristics, background and more. This means:

Inclusive experiences: Inclusive user experiences are designed to make people of all genders, all culture and all abilities feel welcome, safe and empowered. It is about creating experiences that are not just accessible and usable for everyone, but make everyone feel as if it was designed just for someone like them in mind.

Inclusive content: The content you create can attract, repel or even cause harm. Your choice of

language⁠

imagery⁠

can have a huge influence on the way in which you make people feel welcome and valued through their interactions with you. Multimodal content can help people consume your content in ways suit them best. Internationalisation can extend you reach around the world.

Responsible use of data & technology: In order to innovate inclusively you’ll need to pay particular attention to the ethical and responsible use of data and technology. This means striking the delicate balance of respecting privacy and gathering data in order to understand and improve the experiences of underserved groups. It also means considering the ethical implications, sociotech impact, potential bias and risk of harm of your technology choices such as the use of artificial intelligence for face recognition, voice recognition, or automated decision making.

By embedding inclusion into your people, practices, and products, you can create truly inclusive and equitable products and services that meet the needs of diverse users and communities, and grow your success in the market.

If you’d like support embedding inclusion into your people, products and practices,

Contact Diversily⁠

to find out how we can help.

People - Practice - Product

Inclusive people

Inclusive practices

Inclusive products

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