Category Archives: Innovation

Question everything to break out of habitual thinking

in Innovation

big pinata at Mi Pueblo Restaurant in TIjuana

Innovation comes from new ways of seeing and new ways of being. Learn to see different, learn to be different, and you will discover the different.

Though Tijuana has to come to be known as a place where you’ll find great food, I don’t think that is the case. For example, take a stroll through West Los Angeles and you are bound to find more food variety and differentiated restaurants than in Tijuana. Same goes for San Diego. Yes Tijuana has great food, but it’s not like you can’t find it anywhere else.

This weekend I had lunch at a very colorful traditional mexican food restaurant in Tijuana. The inside of the restaurant is themed as a city and it has the biggest Pinata I’ve ever seen in my life!…

Are we overly obsessed with disruptive ideas?

in Innovation, Question-To-Innovate, Questions

Are we overly obsessed with disruptive ideas?

If you disrupt and can’t sustain, you don’t win. – Gary Pisano

Disruptive innovations that throw industries into chaos hog the spotlight. We are all transfixed by Google’s Moonshot attempts at either changing transportation, how we interact with objects and people that we believe those are the only innovations that matter.

Academics and consultants like coming up with fancy ways of describing certain types of behaviors and outcomes, and when it comes to innovation incremental and radical are such they use to describe and compare between small plain-vanilla innovation and radical or disruptive innovation.…

You can’t change the world if you haven’t seen the problem

in Innovation

From 6 lessons on innovation from Bill and Melinda Gates:

You can’t conceptualize and find the solution for a problem you have never experienced or witnessed. The couple reckon that in order to truly be innovative you have to look at the problem and witness the suffering the problem causes.

Bingo! Innovation always starts with empathy.…

To find the truth you have to look within

in Innovation, Marketing

Peter Drucker famously remarked, “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said”. The same could be said of innovation techniques such as direct observation and journalistic interviews. You might ask people questions and have them tell you stories about themselves, but they can’t tell you how to matter. Finding the WHY is similar to uncovering market insights, you’re piecing together a puzzle and then suddenly the missing piece to the puzzle pops into your head. But that missing piece was founds as the result of perspective shifting and synthesis.

Last week I spent some time with a client who wants to develop his own brand. I literally shadowed him for 4 days in an effort to help him find his truth. In industry parlance this is called ethnography. For me it’s simply Finding The Truth.…

Why deadlines impede innovation

in Creativity, Innovation

It’s almost impossible to come up with really innovative things when you have a deadline and schedule.

It is no secret that constraints drive innovation. But what about deadlines? Deadlines, when managed well, can be a motivation–but when abused, can set you back. Here are a few things to consider before jumping on the “deadlines are imperative” bandwagon:…

So what? Finding a hook for your idea is an innovation imperative

in Creativity, entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing

Innovative ideas, initiatives, products, culture transformations, have little chance to succeed if they aren’t enabled by smart communications. And it all starts with a simple and easily understood message. 

I’m in the process (pre-production) of co-producing a film with a Director friend of mine. The idea for the film wasn’t mine, so one of the first things I asked him after I read the script was: what’s the hook?

That was at the end of October last year. To this day, that question remains unanswered. And as we’ve been casting for the last two weeks, most of the actors have asked us the same question: what’s the hook?…

3 tips that will help you better define a problem

in Creativity, Innovation
Mission Viejo

Takeru Kobayashi (Photo credit: yamchild)

If you start with the wrong problem, it’s unlikely you’ll ever arrive at an effective solution.

Think about a problem you’d really like to solve, and before you spend a lot of time and energy trying to solve that problem, first define exactly what the problem is. Or better yet, redefine the problem.…