INNOVATION & YOU

“In today’s world there are far too many people who feel that the creative spark is just that. Over the past few years,

I have come across hundreds of individuals and teams who have all felt that even mild incremental secondary innovations are beyond their capabilities but I’ve found that the following six topic areas, if taken to heart and practiced can help even the most skeptical protagonist ignite their creative flame.”

Find the Need

Whether you are innovating for a single individual or an organization you have to find and address a genuine, qualified Need that people care about solving. There are millions of needs so finding one often isn’t as hard as you think — although finding a solution and monetizing it can be difficult… The best innovators are those who are passionate, empathetic and take time to dig into and clearly understand the needs of all of the target stakeholders who are going to use and pay for their new product or service. While this can sometimes feel like trying to mix oil and water together if done successfully then your new innovation will be able to meet everyone’s requirements without distilling its original essence.

Once you have found a Need and developed a solution for it it’s likely that your next step will be to fund it and that means that you will have to meet the needs of a new group of people — your potential investors. Their needs can be very different from those of your target market but if you want to get your solution prototyped and ready for market then you ignore them at your peril.

Always ask Why

‘Why’ should be used much more than it is during the innovation consulting process. Without it you will create a something that at best is incrementally better than an existing solution and at worst a flop. If you’re trying to enter a crowded market then as recent Harvard surveys have shown being incrementally better just isn’t good enough. To beat out an incumbent your solution has to be ten times better and that’s tough to do.

Of course every innovation or ideation session begins with ‘Why’ but if you only ask the question once or twice then you won’t get to the heart of the Need and if you aren’t getting to the heart of the Need then you won’t understand the real problem or why people care about solving it and ultimately when it comes to articulating your innovations unique attributes to your target audience and investors all you’ll be stuck with is an ambiguous value proposition. Using Why will not only help you create a better solution but it will also help you define your innovations USP.

Only after asking Why as many times as you need to until you reach the real crux of the problem should you start designing your solution.

Imagine Perfection

One of the more famous phrases out there at the moment is “Start with the end in mind” and used correctly it can be a very powerful tool. Early on during the innovation process try to visualize what Perfection would like for your customers, but more than that try to visualize all of the downstream impacts and benefits that your solution will have if it is implemented. If this was genuinely your problem what would perfection look like? Visualize and run through the solution scenarios in your head and let them play out to their conclusion, don’t be afraid to get deeply involved.

The best solutions to needs are those that fix the problem in its entirety not just superficially. In today’s world where designing a solution for one Need can inadvertently create a problem elsewhere a good innovator needs to be aware of the downstream implications and try to solve or reduce their impact.

Borrow

Many innovators become specialists within particular sectors or cultures. While there is nothing wrong with specializing it can limit your vision. Many industries and cultures have some of the same problems but they’ve often solved them in different ways, a process that biologists call Divergent Evolution. Sometimes those solutions are good and sometimes they’re poor but having a broad range of cross industry and cross culture experiences will sometimes allow you to identify the best solutions and port them across to answer another Need in another industry.

Clear the Deck

Many people’s ability to innovate is often blinkered because while they might have found a genuine Need the only solutions they can see are ones that already exist and they try to make those solutions incrementally better. While this Secondary Innovation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and much of the Chinese economy is built on it, it often means that people are simply trying to evolve today’s poor solution and the result is all too frequently something that still doesn’t answer the customers Need.

Clearing the Deck is a technique that often has surprising consequences and it’s simple. Now that you have found a need start from a blank canvass. What if the current solution to the problem never existed, how would you solve it?

For example, if the toaster had never existed how would you toast your bread? When you clear you mind of everything that has gone before suddenly you find yourself coming up with new, sometimes extraordinary ways of doing things.

Break all the rules

Breaking the rules means Breaking all the rules. What if once you had identified a Need you could create a solution that didn’t have to obey, for example, the laws of nature or physics? What solution would you design? Sometimes applying this style of dramatic outside the box thinking, where there are literally no laws to govern you can lead to dramatic new discoveries, some of which might be completely unrelated to your original your original query.

Conclusion

We are all naturally creative but sometimes it’s easy to loose the spark but there are many different ways you can reignite it and release your inner innovator.