Resources

Updated in collaboration between MITRE's Innovation Toolkit (ITK) and Social Justice Platform (SJP), ITK PAINstorming helps improve your team’s understanding of a user’s behaviors, pain points, assumptions, and needs. This worksheet helps focus your team on addressing actual user preferences, and it can also help explore assumptions or unknown gaps about users. In addition, the embedded equity lens helps your team broaden their perspective to consider what else may have historically occurred or be contributing to today’s current status quo. Collectively exploring these additional questions will help your team develop deeper insights about your ideal user and identify more opportunities for innovation.

Developed in collaboration between MITRE's Innovation Toolkit (ITK) and Social Justice Platform (SJP), the ITK Quickstart Stakeholder Engagement canvas is divided into two complementary sides – “Analysis” and “Engagement”. The “Analysis” side of the canvas helps your team identify and assess a stakeholder’s needs, wants, and influence. It also helps your team get clear on their wants and needs, which will help identify where the team’s priorities do or do not match with the stakeholder. The “Engagement” side of the canvas helps your team consider how to approach the first (or next) engagement with the stakeholder. In addition, the embedded equity lens helps your team explore four additional considerations beyond the default to help create more equity-informed engagements. This helps broaden your team’s thinking and raise their collective awareness, both of which can help inspire new thinking and opportunities for innovation.

The ITK Stakeholder Power Categories tool helps your team quickly categorize and prioritize which stakeholders to engage, by considering each stakeholder’s power over the effort and how much each stakeholder is impacted by the effort. This tool contains an equity lens that emphasizes direct participation by those who are most impacted and often overlooked or excluded. This tool also helps your team ideate how to elevate the most impacted stakeholders by giving them active roles in the effort.

Updated in collaboration between MITRE's Innovation Toolkit (ITK) and Social Justice Platform (SJP), the ITK Problem Framing canvas helps your team explore a problem space and formulate a robust problem statement to ensure you’re solving the right problem. In addition, this tool embeds an equity lens which encourages teams to create not just inclusive and diverse solutions, but to create equitable solutions. The equity lens helps your team consider how the team's biases and assumptions may influence the solution, and it also helps your team design at the edge for those with the greatest need or opportunity.

The ITK Stakeholder Identification canvas, cocreated by SJP, helps your team ideate a more comprehensive & representative set of relevant stakeholders to your project. In addition, this tool embeds an equity lens to help your team be mindful of the needs and priorities of the larger community, which may not be immediately apparent.