Companies that successfully launch new products or services understand that innovation doesn’t just happen out of the blue; it requires intentional effort around culture, processes, and importantly, tooling. Teams need the right tools to continually brainstorm, document new ideas, and bring the best concepts to life.

Since innovation involves much more than just ideation, you need a visual collaboration platform that provides support for every stage—from collecting data as you learn customer pain points all the way to monitoring and refining projects. Lucid is the only visual collaboration solution to combine intelligent diagramming and virtual whiteboarding into a single platform so that you can use Lucid for your entire innovation process. 

These are the top ways that the Lucid Suite can enhance innovation on your team. 

7 ways Lucid boosts innovation 

Innovation requires constant iteration. Luckily, Lucid makes it easy to take a non-linear approach to innovative projects as teams come together to brainstorm, visualize data, create a record of decisions, and maintain long-term value, all in one visual collaboration platform. 

Here’s how we do it:

We provide a space for every voice to be heard

Innovation needs diversity of thought. The more people who bring forward their ideas, the more unique perspectives you’ll have, helping your team discover ideas that may never have been possible otherwise.

The best ideas can come from the most unexpected places, but there are many challenges to ensuring that every member of your team feels comfortable contributing—and that their ideas are equally heard. Between different collaboration styles and coworkers operating from different locations and time zones, it’s easy for the loudest voices in the room to become dominant. 

Lucid levels the playing field for contribution. In the Lucid Suite, team members contribute equally to an infinite canvas; anyone can provide their thoughts and ideas, whether they’re working remotely, have a more junior role, or are the deep-thinking, introspective type. Lucid supports collaboration equity with features that make it easy to gather everyone’s opinions, including:

• Voting and timers to gather ideas within a specified amount of time.

• Brainstorming and ideation templates to kickstart planning sessions.

• Visual Activities to highlight areas of agreement and disagreement.

• Emoji reactions and other ways to gather feedback.

By using Lucid, you can ensure that every team member has the opportunity to participate and be heard, boosting diversity of thought for innovative ideas. 

We enable continuous collaboration whenever and wherever you are

Collaboration is key to innovation. If teams aren’t able to work together effectively, this makes it more difficult to conceptualize or act on innovative ideas; according to a recent survey, 75% of workers say either ineffective communication or collaboration is a barrier to innovation.

Lucid helps remove this barrier to innovation by keeping your team aligned during meetings and well after meetings have ended. As an all-in-one platform, you can use Lucid to make your live, synchronous meetings more inclusive and efficient, then afterward, keep using Lucid to maintain momentum asynchronously as people contribute on their own time to share ideas or present information—even if you work on a distributed team. 

Some Lucid features that help you continuously collaborate with your team include:

• Loom and Zight integrations so you can record the walk-through of a project in Lucid, explaining the project’s instructions and deadlines, and save the recording for people to watch on their own time. This makes it easy for team members who are in other time zones or on vacation to get up to speed. 

• Paths and Frames, which allow you to direct someone to view a specific aspect of your board in Lucidspark. Use Frames to identify relevant content, then connect frames with a Path so users have a guide. This way, people get the information they need to navigate the board and provide their own input.

• A commenting feature that allows you to provide context, ask questions, or even tag and assign tasks to specific team members. By adding comments, you can collaborate synchronously or leave notes for later.

Using a visual collaboration platform is an efficient and powerful way to communicate across teams. Unlike email or instant messaging tools, you don’t have to leave long wordy explanations; visuals allow team members to quickly pick up on concepts and get their own ideas across. By using Lucid, teams can keep iterating, ideating, sharing insights, and moving innovation projects forward.

We have templates for each stage of innovation

No matter where you’re at in your innovation process, Lucid offers templates for everything from gathering customer insights to brainstorming, prototyping, experimenting, and scaling. Use an innovation framework to keep your team aligned as you identify customer problems and take a solution from conception to market.

You can use Lucid’s templates throughout each of the five stages of innovation:

• Stage one: learn, in which you complete research and collect data on customers and their pain points. Use Lucid to build out a research plan, build user personas, or create journey maps.

• Stage two: ideate, in which you generate a wide range of solutions and identify which ones to prioritize for the next stage. Use brainstorming templates and ideation strategies to guide your team. 

• Stage three: prototype and test. Collect data on the ideas you brainstormed and test potential solutions. Here, you can use GIF storyboarding or wireframe templates.

• Stage four: iterate, where you build out the solution and conduct experiments. Experiment, learn, and repeat as you collect real data and use an experiment map, innovation accounting template, or build and learn cards. 

• Stage five: scale. In this last stage, use the customer segmentation template or business model canvas as you create a long-term plan to sustain your solution in the marketplace.

Not only do our templates help save time, but they also help with consistency by ensuring that your team is aligned during each stage of innovation. You can even create your own custom templates in both Lucidspark and Lucidchart.

We naturally create a valuable document repository

When you use Lucid’s infinite canvas to collaborate, you naturally create a record of all your ideas, decisions, plans, and designs. In other words, you record the path to innovation. 

This documentation, called an innovation repository, can be easily referenced by everyone on your team and by other teams for cross-functional collaboration. You can even share your documents with external stakeholders such as clients and customers.

An innovation repository helps everyone understand why certain decisions have been made, what has been tried before, and what the ultimate vision or end goal is. Teams need this context and shared understanding in order to successfully innovate. They also need this information to make innovation a repeatable process so they can continue to introduce changes and ideas in the future. 

In Lucid, you can centralize all important resources into a single source of truth with team hubs, making it easy to align on innovation projects. Within these hubs, you can also create a team space to share learnings on experiments or research, mark progress, and record the results of brainstorming sessions.  

We help your teams gather and interpret key data points

As an innovation repository, Lucid helps you gather and visualize the necessary data for each stage of innovation. Whether you’re narrowing down potential solutions to a customer pain point or you’re establishing a go-to-market plan for an update on a product, you can visualize your entire portfolio of innovation projects in Lucid. 

Thanks to templates and intelligent features, you can use Lucid to: 

• Record and visualize the results of experiments during the iteration stage. With Lucid, you can automatically create visuals from outside data sources such as spreadsheets, saving your team time and manual effort.

• Create alerts for important information or highlight things that require immediate attention, thanks to conditional formatting. By setting your own conditional formatting rules, your team can interpret data quickly.

• Determine how your scaling stage is progressing. Use Lucid to clarify customer segments as you plan long-term success.

• Create a data-linked dashboard in Lucid to get all the details of projects, including progress and spend, at a glance.

• Determine what exactly success looks like by using the innovation accounting template to inform decisions.

Lucid brings all of your key data points together, keeping your team aligned and enhancing innovation by having everything in one central place.

We kickstart ideation and diagramming with AI

Lucid’s AI tools help you create visuals and kick off projects faster than ever. As you’re focused on coming up with ideas and improving processes, AI eliminates some of the manual work, freeing your team to quickly ideate and move on to further stages in the innovation framework.

With AI in Lucid, you can: 

• Quickly expand upon existing ideas to kickstart the ideation phase of your innovation project. 

• Generate diagrams to enhance productivity and free your time to focus on what really matters. For example, you can use AI to create flowcharts of user flows and gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey.

• Summarize sticky notes to quickly capture an overall picture of the team’s thoughts and ideas.

Lucid’s AI capabilities are particularly useful for harnessing the power of divergent thinking, a type of thinking that explores multiple possibilities and encourages different perspectives. By using AI to embrace divergent thinking, you can unlock ideas and solutions that might not otherwise have been realized. 

We keep teams aligned and accountable

Innovation requires that teams be able to pivot quickly, whether they’re reacting to findings based on experiments, customer insights, or market changes. Iteration is essential throughout the innovation process in order to provide a truly high-value solution to customers.

Lucid helps keep your teams aligned so they can better respond to change. Not only can you easily create timelines to keep everyone on the same page about deadlines and progress, you can also add Lucid Cards to keep track of action items and give visibility into milestones and dependencies. 

On top of this, Lucid has dozens of integrations that add value to your team as you focus on innovation, including:

• Bidirectional integrations with systems of record like Jira and Asana, allowing any updates that are made in one platform to be automatically pushed to the other. 

• The possibility to embed links from outside sources such as Figma or Google Docs directly into your Lucid boards. 

• The ability to easily share Lucid docs in Slack to enhance communication and use Lucid’s AI capabilities to summarize a Lucid doc right in a Slack channel. 

Ready to boost innovation with Lucid?

Lucid takes your team’s innovation to the next level. From gathering research on customer pain points to establishing a long-term plan to sustain your solution in the market, Lucid’s visual collaboration platform provides all the tools you need to enhance productivity, collaboration, and innovation. According to a user survey, Lucid:

• Saves users 2.4 hours per week when developing and launching products. 

• Increases collaboration for 86% of users among hybrid teams. 

• Helps 85% of users be more agile and iterate faster. 

Our professional services team can help you get value with Lucid and complete innovation projects quicker than ever before. If you’re looking to take the next step in innovation, contact us today to see how the Lucid Suite can increase collaboration and iteration for your business.