Tag Archives: Innovation

Must read innovation stories of the week: Getting it done

in Must reads of the week

It was an ‘innovation packed’ week that had everything starting from making excuses, ideating around small ideas, how to get it done, popular tools to use to tackle challenges and how to test your ideas. Pretty good eh!

 

INNOVATION: Change your internal chip

in Creativity, Greatness, Innovation, Thinking

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” – Einstein

Yesterday I was with a client proposing some new initiatives and as always there’s a bottleneck to new ideas. Someone’s ego prevents them from seeing other alternatives to how things can be done, they’re so set in their traditional views that anything new is irrelevant. In thinking about this fact with some of the people there I said: Like computer chips that evolve and get better all the time, so must we.

Voila!

Do you remember how in the movie Terminator 2 Sarah and John Connor so it can can learn and stop following preset rules? Well that’s exactly what we have to do with ourselves, and people who are impervious to ‘there’s always a better way’ speak.…

Must read innovation stories of the week: What are you the most at?

in Must reads of the week

You wont stand out from the crowd if you keep playing by the same old rules as everyone else in your market. Are you the most of anything?

 

 

Weekend innovation tip: Be a kid again

in Innovation tips

Guess what? ‘innovation’ is going to be the keyword of the year again. More specifically how you reinvent your business from the inside out is what’s going to separate the leaders from the laggards and this doesn’t happen with some magic potion, it happens with questioning the assumptions by which your business operates.

According to new research one of the is ‘questioning’, as in questioning the status quo. If you plan to get your company on the fast track to innovation this year, then asking questions is the first place to start and such as why? why not? and what if?

 

Now that you get it, here’s an exercise for you to help you cultivate the habit of ‘questioning’:

  • Write 10 questions each day that challenge assumptions in your company or industry.

 

Yes, that’s it. Once you do this for a couple of weeks go back to your list and look for ways to reverse those assumptions or better yet, think how you can eliminate them from your thinking and come up with something new.

 

Understand: questions open the mind to new things, to more possibilities, to alternatives to new perspectives, they unbox your mind and take it back to childhood when anything was possible. The goal is to think like a kid again, without limits. Anything is possible.

Innovation is a habit

in Creativity, Innovation

Accepting reality has it’s advantages as it makes you focus intensely in the moment, but it also has it’s disadvantages because it puts imagination in the backseat!

Act different to think different. Easier said than done right? The truth is we’ve already , we just forget we did it. How is this possible? How is it that we lost that inquisitive mind? We just lost our imagination, threw the crayons away and got caught up in the reality of the adult world. That’s what happened!

Most innovations come out of some insight (aha! moment) someone had and it was all because this person was looking deeper and questioning the ‘believed’ truth of how something works. Just like kids, inquisitive people have a habit of questioning everything, looking for deeper insight by questioning the truth. Yet most people accept things for what they are, why is this? Because it’s safe, it’s that simple. We get trapped in automatic, mechanical thinking with no interest in asking why we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing and how we’re doing it.…

Weekend innovation tip: Go lateral

in Innovation tips

What if your new product or service was like a cow? How would look like? How would it work? Why would people want to use it?  Why would they hire you? Would they tell their friends about it?…Get the picture?

 

Sometimes when we’re looking for inspiration but can’t find it we get stuck, a good strategy to get ‘unstuck’ is to start ‘whatifing’. Just like asking ‘why’ five times is a good way to get to an insight, asking ‘what if’ opens your mind to seeming unrelated things you might not thought of before. Inspiration comes instantly like a bolt of lightning!

 

It’s no surprise that some of the most crazy ideas come from asking ‘what if’ a whole bunch of times because it forces your mind to look at something from a completely different context than before.

 

Check out this clever book 100 Whats of Creativity, written by Don the Idea Guy. The will help spark your creativity and lead you to someplace you’ve never been before.

Must read innovation stories of the week: Make new mistakes

in Must reads of the week

Make new mistakes? Yes, that’s right. If you always follow the tried and true, what worked before, being right, always having the same answer then you’ll never come up with anything original. To foster a culture of innovation you need to go off the same road you’ve always been walking in and if you feel a certain ‘fear’ that it’s not the best thing to do, then you’ll know you are on the right path because it means you don’t know what might happen.

Have the .

 

To achieve the impossible we must first try the impossible which is letting go of what worked before and trying something new.