Open Innovation Toolkit
A community sourced set of best practices and principles to help incorporate human-centered design into a product development process.
The website contains dozens of methods organised by process, difficulty, time required, and outcomes. Each method contains an overview, detailed, steps, resources, and examples or cases.
The methods are framed in terms of private sector product or service development but can be adapted to a public sector context.
The Open Innovation Toolkit is a website working as a community-driven database of the best practices and principles that help input human-centred design into a product development process. There are three broad categories within the process: gather insights, ideate, prototype & test. Each stage contains some methods designed with a purpose, an outcome, an approximate time, a level of complexity, the number of participants required (min and max), and the materials needed. The steps to complete each method are detailed precisely with other resources and references indicated.
The platform is very visual and easy to use; the user can also find the methods by outcome: discover, generate ideas, prioritise, validate, create consensus, and understand. It is not just theoretical but engages the user to complete the activities and practice his/her knowledge and processes. The exercises are not too complex and very comprehensive to tackle the problem or achieve the user’s goals. I recommend this toolkit highly as it is very efficient to find innovative exercises and methods, especially when having to complete a development process in groups.