Punish failure.
Someone made a comment about how some of the recommendations that I made on a recent post where ready made solutions for how to stimulate innovation in any organization. They are not. They are idea starters on how to drive innovation in any business, tactics that have been used elsewhere. But they are not ready made solutions that you can just plug and play into your organization.…
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This is part three of the series on how to leave small thinking behind. In the first post, I showed you a simple technique for coming up with radical ideas. On the second part, I showed you how to evaluate ideas so they don’t fit into “me-too” territory. Here, I’ll tell you how to determine which ideas might work.
A short recap from part 1 and part 2:
In part 1 of this series I elaborated a little bit on how to shift from “me-too” thinking to “radical thinking” by taking your existing strategy and stretching it to an extreme, and scaling them back a little bit. This technique yields ideas that are impractical, super expensive and dangerous. But you can scale them back a little bit to make them doable.
In part 2, I showed you how to further filter those initial ideas by using an evaluation criteria of creativity, business, and people impact.
Great, but after you’ve developed a list of radical ideas how do you decide which ones to pursue?…
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This is a three part post on how to leave small thinking behind. In the first post, I showed you a simple technique for coming up with radical ideas. Here I talk about how to evaluate ideas so they don’t fit into the “me-too” territory. On the third post I’ll tell you how to determine which ideas might work.
We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view. – Mao Tse-tung
I know a handful of people that work in the “innovation/entrepreneurship space” who talk a good talk but when it’s time to put the wheels on the road, more times than not, they revert to small thinking. Heck, I’ve even heard people outright say they think big but when challenged further they are shocked to their bones.
This isn’t an isolated scenario, most everyone is like this. Heck, how many companies plaster their physical and digital (Facebook) walls with inspirational quotes, but when you look inside you see that their actions don’t reflect their wishful thinking.
When you’re looking for innovative ideas that will truly differentiate your company and have major market impact, you must set the yardstick high and keep it high. You may think you’ve left small thinking behind, but often, even if you are benchmarking outside your industry, challenging the status quo of your business, or radicalizing your current strategy, small thinking will creep in. It most always does.
Why?…
This is part one of the series on how to leave small thinking behind. In this first post, I’ll show you a simple technique for coming up with radical ideas. In the second part, you’ll learn how to evaluate ideas so they don’t fit into “me-too” territory. In part three, I’ll tell you how to determine which ideas might work.
Perception separates the innovator from the imitator. So, a shift in perspective is all that is needed to see opportunities for new offerings. Here is one creative approach to do that…
One of the challenges of coming up with unconventional ideas is the weight of past ideas. Not just the ones you’ve applied, but also the ones you’ve seen, heard, tasted, smelled and felt, all of these are in your memory. You see, what we have stored in our heads is just as much a blocker of uncommon ideas as is your boss not giving you permission to go wild.
This is why the first 15 – 30 you come up with are always going to be very obvious. They are stuff you’ve already seen before. To get to the good stuff you have force your brain to come up with more. But this is quite hard and takes some time for many to do…
But let’s suppose you don’t have the time to sit down and make a list of 50 – 100 different ideas on how to solve a pressing challenge. What’s a quick way to shake things up?…
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Big data and analytics are going to alter customer experiences through personalization. But, companies should be wise get out of the building and not assume that big data is an innovation silver bullet.
As companies adopt great business insights such as social and big data technologies, automation and anticipation will become hotly adopted strategies to create or enhance existing offerings. While people are stuck perpending over kibana vs grafana, many retailers are getting ahead in the competition simply because they’re focused on their development by implementing new strategies and using more advanced business software such as the ones developed by CBX. For some industries, such as retail, providing the option for customers to order through their mobile phone is the first step towards automation and anticipation, and pretty soon we’ll start seeing people’s orders waiting for them before they even order them.
With all the data about customer habits it has accumulated over the years, Starbucks is a company that is uniquely positioned to do this. I don’t know the exact number of times the average person stops by Starbucks on their way to work, but I’m sure it is in the 3 day average.
That’s an ingrained habit.
But, even with some sense of certainty of what people might do, we still have to ask ourselves some questions: How will customers benefit from us anticipating what they will order today? At what point does novelty wear off? How will it make them feel? What would make them feel less uncomfortable?…
This is going to surprise you, but you already have all the tools you need to be an innovator: your senses.
Simply put, opportunities are all around us. When we take the time to notice them, they can stimulate more creative thoughts within each of us. Contrary to popular belief, creative genius can be developed. But just like everything that is important, it takes work.
Studies have identified 5 core skills of successful innovators, these complementary skills form the Innovator’s DNA:
I would add visualization to that list too because you have to be able to communicate your ideas in the form of a sketch, drawing or anything that looks like a prototype. You don’t have to be an artist to be able to sketch ideas, you just have to be able to take what you see in your head and draw it with stick figures on a piece of paper.
This last point is very important because modern innovation methodologies require that anyone be able to understand context via observation and questions, identify insights, synthesize those insights into ideas in the form of a prototype.
For more specific tools that will help enhance the above abilities, here are a few that I use:
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Here’s a pop quiz for you, do you think it is easier to be innovative if:
If your answer is #2, pay attention because this post is for you…
I’m proud to say that the people and companies that I’ve worked with have always complimented me on, sadly something that isn’t common, my follow through.
Why? I have a sense of mission to get things done. As a result, I have issues with people with poor follow through.…