Manual on Innovation for Cooperatives
The Innovation Manual aims to join cooperatives in their journey in pursuing innovation within their organizations. It intends to normalize the idea of innovation and give cooperatives more confidence in purposively searching for various gaps and opportunities in improving or developing its products, processes, systems and/or technologies. The framework used is an approach called Design Thinking which is composed of five main steps: (1) Empathy (2) Challenge Definition (3) Ideation (4) Prototyping and (5) Testing. The manual not only guides the entire process of the problem- solving but also formalizes and documents the step-by-step implementation of the prototyped and tested solution through the second section of Innovation Management. It allows cooperatives to record all their innovation efforts with the intention of putting systems in place in order to establish the innovation culture and processes of the entire cooperative. After learning and accomplishing this manual, cooperatives should have been able to develop and implement more innovation efforts and hopefully, this would just be the beginning of a continuous improvement mindset in the organization so as to better serve their intended members and customers.