The SILab: An Invitation to Embrace Innovation
Government agencies and businesses must embrace innovation and strategic thinking to keep up with today’s changing society, rising demands, and complex problems. Encouraging organizations to fully adopt innovative thinking, however, is difficult. Organizations are often focused on their daily activities and have limited time to discover new approaches. In addition, employees often choose to stay with proven, mainstream solutions because they fear wasting resources or failure.
Leading edge organizations are creating innovation labs for their employees to create a ‘virtual place’ to spur creativity. A new atmosphere helps inspire a new way of thinking.
In 2016, Arc Aspicio founded our Strategy Innovation Lab (SILab) to tackle the innovation difficulties with which many organizations struggle. The SILab is an exploratory virtual space that provides the expertise, tools, techniques, facilitators, and executive sponsorship to enable diverse teams to collaborate to solve problems, both small and large.
Both an internal asset and one that our clients can take advantage of, the SI Lab helps teams incubate and test new ideas, receive mentoring on solving difficult client challenges, and learn how to implement our methods and accelerators. (Accelerators are repeatable processes with tools and techniques that help our consultants implement strategy, innovation, and design for clients.)
This active, engaged forum not only gives our employees the creative freedom to invent and access to the tools they need to implement great ideas, but also access to professionals with strategy and design thinking expertise. The SILab helps employees develop ideas and strategies to tackle entrenched problems in the government’s most complex systems. It also helps them ‘visualize’ problems using data analytics and information graphics to convey the problem – and solution – to senior leaders.
The SILab fosters a culture that encourages risk taking. It allows employees to explore ideas without fear of consequences – bring the Government along to innovate in a safe environment. The SILab provides an invitation to members of an organization to open their minds to different and creative thinking, which leads to innovative solutions and mission and program results for clients.
About Arc Aspicio
Arc Aspicio is a management, strategy, and technology consulting firm that takes a mission-oriented approach to complex client challenges. As a rapidly growing company, Arc Aspicio has a bold strategy for 2016-2018 that drives growth through new capabilities in strategy, design, human capital, data analytics, information sharing, cybersecurity, and strategic communications. The company is known for a strong, collaborative culture that values gratitude – for its clients and its great team. And, #welovedogs! Follow us on Twitter @arcaspicio or learn more at www.arcaspicio.com.
