Tag Archives: Innovation

How to find the best insights for innovation

Jorge in Innovation

Every successful business out there started from the seed of an insight. Their business model is based on that initial insight. But once a business becomes established, that initial insight becomes irrelevant and so does their business model. One thing that limits innovation in established companies is that employees don’t have access to insights or worse yet, don’t know what an insight is to begin with. This is an ongoing problem as stated by a recent study by CapGemini which says that New Products Fail Due to Lack of Customer Insight. There you go!

For your next source of growth you need ‘new insights’, and good ones too. Because without good insights the chances of moving your ideas forward is slim. So what’s an insight? It’s an undeniable consumer or customer truth.

Great, but how do you identify them?

The ‘insight’ statement

Yesterday I listened in on Maddock Douglas’s ‘How to find the best insights’ webinar and they propose a very simple way of identifying them:

For example: I eat fast food (fact) because it’s convenient (why) but I end up regretting it.

That’s a potential insight for an idea. Next thing to do is ask the all-important ‘Why?’ various times to dig deeper and uncover the ‘real truth’. This is NOT the end of the search, there’s more to it than just putting a statement together but I thought of this as a useful starting point.

You won’t snatch these statements out of the sky, you’ll have to immerse yourself into people’s lives and observe them. Become them. Feel what they feel. Speak their language. It’s also important to understand that the people you’re observing won’t come out and tell you their ‘insight statement’ so you’ll have to put the pieces together and connect the dots between all the things you notice.

More to come! I’ll post the slides and audio from the webinar when I get them by next week, it’s really useful stuff Winking smile

Update: Below is the full webinar on How to find the best insights. Enjoy!

How to Find the Best Insights webinar recording from Maddock Douglas, Inc. on Vimeo.

For innovation firepower turn weakness into strength

Jorge in Innovation, Strategy

I’m not a fan of the idea of only working on your strengths and ignoring your weaknesses. It’s too one-dimensional and leads to ‘more of the same’. This idea of only working on your strengths surely leads to continuous improvement no doubt but not dramatic change. Only by working on your strengths ‘continuously’ and turning your weaknesses into strengths can you have superior capability.

On Saturday night I was watching UFC 124 and watched Georges St. Pierre dominate his opponent by basically doing nothing. His opponent, Koscheck, had to much respect for him that he decided to be tentative and never showed any intent in fighting. And thus made all of us watch a boring fight.

Why didn’t a guy that was aggressive pre-fight, look like a punching bag at fight time?

Because Georges St. Pierre is a superior all-around-fighter, and made Koscheck’s game plan irrelevant. GPS is versatile and can adapt to any fighting style on the fly. This is what makes him so good. He has no obvious weaknesses. The guy is a strategist.

What GSP does, is work on his weaknesses and turns them into strengths. This has lead to a dramatic change in his fight style and more importantly how his opponents perceive him. His opponents come prepared with a strategy to defeat him, but GSP adapts to it. This leaves his opponents in limbo as their game plan is now made irrelevant by a fighter who shows no weakness.

What does this have to do with innovation?

Working on improving/eliminating your weaknesses leads to dramatic change. It’s like renewal. A few weeks ago Ralph Ohr wrote a great post on how there are basically two ways that organizations compete in a market:

meet existing needs and expectations that customers are aware of,
anticipate needs that customers are not (yet) aware of (perception).

The first is short term focused and relies on an organization exploiting it’s known strengths. The second, relies on going beyond the known. Sometimes even relinquishing some of it’s strengths and turning their weaknesses into strengths. The majority of organizations focus on meeting existing needs (known by analysis) but not on anticipating needs. This logic is pervasive. It’s what you’re taught in school to do. Anticipating needs (imagination+insight), which was taken away in school, is done by very few.

As Ralph noted in his post: Successful companies of the future will most likely be able to combine both capabilities.

Basically, most organizations are good at exploiting existing capabilities but not good at creating new ones. Among other things, it’s this lack of imagination that is the weakness of most organizations.

Do you see the connection?

Last week I wrote that in the world of innovation there should be a balance between innovation and continuous improvement. You have ‘projects’ that are intended to improve your product or service, but also have ‘projects’ that are beyond your known domain that are meant to either stretch your existing capabilities or acquire new ones. This is the way to go! By only improving your strengths you’ve already setup your tombstone.

To be built to last is to be built to change, and that only happens by continuously improving what you’re good at and relentlessly working on turning your weaknesses into strengths. Your strengths might save you in the short term, but your next source of advantage most likely will come from turning your weaknesses into strengths. And thus, will keep you relevant in the long term.

Thoughts?

Innovation posts of the week: Innovation Think/Do Cycle

Jorge in Must reads of the week

Two-Footed Questions for Innovative Results by @ellenfweber
Beware of Facts & Innovation by @dscofield
Two Ways to Hire Effective Innovators – HBR
This Little Piggy – Become the Only Ones by @lindegaard
Why customer experience innovation matters now by @ovoinnovation
People Who Have More Fun At Work Are More Innovative – Business Insider
Achieving a sense of renewal to your innovation activities by @paul4innovating
How Learning Leads to Results – Strategy+Business
Innovation Think/Do Cycle by @andrewhargadon

Balance innovation and continuous improvement

Jorge in Innovation

All of us know that if you we want to make sweeping changes, we need to innovate. If done incrementally (in small improvements), it won’t attract much attention. FedEx became a success story as they changed people’s expectations (absolutely, positively overnight) of delivery services, delivered on their promise and charged a premium for it. However, innovation projects are never “complete”.

Since then, FedEx has embarked on continuous improvement of their “absolutely, positively overnight” service. One such improvement is information sharing. Every shipper and receiver (or anyone with the tracking #) can find out exactly where the shipment is at a particular point in time. FedEx customers may not need all the information that they provide but making the information available will only enhance the credibility of the
company.

One more point to note is that radical innovations are risky, too. Not all of them will succeed. So, you should ensure that there is a “tolerance” for failure at your workplace. Second, you should be willing to emotionally detach from this failure and embark on the next innovation project. Whenever an capm test succeeds, the next immediate step would be to put that project on a “continuous improvement” roadmap. Because no project is really “complete”.

In summary take a look at all the projects that are taking place in your life and it’s easy to categorize each one of them under “Innovation” or “Continuous Improvement”. If there are no innovation projects, there is a serious problem. If there are past innovation projects that are not under a “Continuous improvement” plan, there is an issue too. The beauty is in balancing the Innovation and Continuous Improvement initiatives.

Thoughts?

The flip side of uncertainty

Jorge in Creativity, Innovation, Psychology, Thinking

When we present new ideas that are better or different to what currently exists they carry the weight of uncertainty. This is a problem we all face. What is uncertain is unappealing. And everything right now, everyone says, is uncertain. But just like there’s a flip side to everything the same applies to uncertainty.

See this exchange between Patch Adams and Arthur Mendelson from the Movie Patch Adams:…

Where is innovation going?

Jorge in Innovation

I spotted this question on Linkedin and thought I’d repost here to get your responses.

What’s more valuable, being awesome of being innovative? I’m sure most people can tell you what’s awesome but can’t tell you what’s innovative. There’s a reason for this.

Innovation has lost it’s definition, everyone has their own definition. Because innovation is really a matter of perception, what’s innovative to one person is not for another. Ex. FaceTime is innovative here but not in Japan. This creates a problem with defining innovation and ultimately applying it the world over.

The world is becoming more interconnected and the assumption is that there should/will be more ‘innovation’. Innovation has always been here, it’s a fundamental human process. The only difference now is that more people will become aware of it and might be encouraged to do it because interconnectedness creates more opportunities. But more likely a lot of crap is going to be created and lot less of what really matters is not going to be created.

Yet the crap that doesn’t matter actually serves to create the stuff that does, because someone will be dissatisfied and will me motivated to do something better. ‘Less is more’ will never be more important. We’ll institute innovation as a matter of ‘being’ yet it will be taken to extremes. The word innovation will cease to make sense and won’t be able to differentiate. Being awesome is the new innovation. Does what you do matter to people?

Bottom line: Let’s change the question to where do we want innovation to go? The intent behind it is what’s going/needs to change.

Let it rip, what do you really think?