What is a fundamental requirement for an extraordinary innovation process? Collaboration in my mind, hands down. While the main focus of our agency is marketing, customer service, and business success, we also focus on creativity and innovation. Why might you be thinking?
Because everything in marketing and customer service depends on creative and innovative change. So from time to time, we address interesting ways to enhance creative thinking and innovation. Today we address what we consider to be the fundamental building blocks of an innovative process.
Collaboration drives creativity because innovation always emerges from a series of sparks – never a single flash of insight.
-K Sawyer
Let’s get the discussion started:
Problem understanding
Alright, you probably think you have a good understanding of what problem you are trying to solve, right? Then go ahead, explain it in one sentence to the person next to you. No one around? Explain it to yourself. Take note of the many “ahems and pauses you are going to make. Don’t worry it takes quite some time and lots of repetition to master this.
Want to see seven ways to improve your collaboration?
Ask the question why … often
What problems are you facing that could be approached differently simply by asking WHY and then WHY again, and then WHY again … until you get to the real definition of the problem?
If you don’t, you may just end up not correctly defining the problem. Not good. Nothing worse than solving the wrong problem. So put in enough time to understanding and defining your problem. Don’t leap to problem-solving before you do. Lots of whys help us explore and thoroughly define the problem.
It takes a keen ability to create spaces where trust can happen, where risks can get taken. We tend to our operationally minded view of the world to try and mitigate and design out as much risk as we can. However, if you want to innovate, you have to take risks. And to take risks, you have to some level of trust within the organization where the innovation is taking place.
Develop beginner’s mind
The beginner’s mind refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would. That is a key mentality you need for innovation.
Trial and error
Take the example of Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, to represent this building block. He did not build the networking site into a $1-billion valued company in one day. He developed his skills and tested ideas while launching and experimenting at SocialNet and PayPal. That is what it takes.
Since long hours of work might be required to satisfy your curiosity, what’s important is how you respond to failure. Can you find the courage to respond, not with embarrassment or regret, but with more questions: Why did this fail? What can I learn now? What will I do differently next time? If you can, like most great inventors and creators throughout history did, you’ll be well on your way.
Experimenting is a critical innovation skill. None of us think twice about learning to ride a bike through trial and error, so why is it so rare in business innovation?
Empathy
A sense of inquiry, of curiosity, is essential for innovation. And the quickest way for removing curiosity, in my opinion, is to have organizations that are too inward-facing. Those are the ones that don’t spend enough time out in the world, particularly with their customers.
But a sense of curiosity, openness, a sense of empathy for the world, for people whose problems they might be trying to solve that’s essential.
Use lots of prototypes
If you’re serious about innovation, you must learn, as second nature, to convert your ideas into prototypes. And as quickly as possible.
Funny thing about ideas is they’re never fully formed – they morph and twist as you talk about them, and as long as you keep talking they keep changing. Converting your ideas into prototypes puts an end to all the nonsense.
Job 1 of the prototype is to help you flesh out your idea – to help you understand what it’s all about. Using whatever you have on hand, create a physical embodiment of your idea. The idea is to build until you can’t, to build until you identify a question you can’t answer.
Job 2 of the prototype is to help others understand your idea. There’s a simple constraint in this phase – you cannot use words – you cannot speak – to describe your prototype. It must speak for itself. You can respond to questions, but that’s it.
And for the questions you cannot answer, they are the next set of learning objectives. Go away, learn and modify your prototype accordingly (or build a different one altogether). Repeat the learning loop until the group has a common understanding of the idea and a list of questions that only a customer can answer.
Job 3 is to help customers understand your idea. At this stage, it’s best if the prototype is at least partially functional, but it’s okay if it “represents” the idea in a clear way. The requirement is prototype is complete enough for the customer can form an opinion. Job 3 is a lot like Job 2, except replace coworker with the customer.
Building a prototype is the fastest, most effective way to communicate an idea. And it’s the best way to learn. The act of building forces you to make dozens of small decisions to questions you didn’t know you had to answer. The physical nature the prototype gives a three-dimensional expression of the idea.
There may be disagreement on the value of the idea the prototype stands for, but there should be no ambiguity about the idea.
If you’re not building prototypes early and often, you’re not doing innovation. It’s that simple.
Innovation process stages
Innovation process … rely on intuition
As our life becomes more dynamic and less structured, intuition gains more and more recognition as an essential innovation decision-making tool. You have probably heard of experienced decision makers who can directly recognize the best option or course of action in many tricky situations. The solution just comes to them from somewhere in their subconscious mind.
Yes, intuition can make you a much more effective at innovation decision maker, especially when you deal with non-standard situations or inexpedient decision making.
Try lots of ideas
A straight forward, simple five-step innovation strategy formula fits the bill:
Step 1 Try lots of stuff.
Step 2 See what works.
Step 3 Heavy up on stuff that works quickly.
Steps 4 Quickly kill stuff that doesn’t work.
Step 5 Review and repeat.
“Unlearn” outdated knowledge
Challenge the way you’ve always done things. Block your mind from thinking in the traditional manner. It’s hard but has to be done.
Compelling leadership
Innovation can be a solitary endeavor, but to be successful, innovators need to be able to rally a team around them. The best leaders get their people so fired up that they’re ecstatic to do their jobs. Their dream is adopted by others, and their team picks up the torch to make that dream a reality.
Just think of Walt Disney, whose empire has grown exponentially since his first sketch of Mickey Mouse. The collective passion of decades of talented artists, Imagineers, and operations personnel has kept his legacy alive and enabled tremendous company growth.
Importance of design
Apple is Apple because of the integration of design and utility.
Design alone won’t get you anywhere, but without a physical, visual appeal, you won’t get anywhere either.
If whatever you’re selling doesn’t look great and isn’t easy to use, it’s lacking. And if it’s lacking, it leaves room for improvement — improvement someone else is likely to act on.
A story to end on
Before the days of one-hour photo shops, digital photography, and instant video feedback, people had to wait up to a week for their pictures to be developed by the local pharmacy or camera shop. When Polaroid came out with a camera that delivered a finished photograph in sixty seconds, people were amazed; the era of instant gratification had begun.
So the story goes, a group of adventurers traveled deep into the Brazilian Rainforest to learn about the indigenous people. When they came across a tribe who had never seen outsiders before, they befriended them and took pictures of them with the Polaroid cameras they brought along. The natives loved the pictures since they had never seen anything like this before, but they did have one complaint, ‘why did it take so long for the pictures to develop?’
The problem is not technology; the problem is one of perception. Like the natives who perceived the sixty-second developing of photographs to be slow, so to do many Web- users perceive the Internet to be slow when in fact it is an incredible technological achievement. Think about it for a moment. Anyone with a computer and Internet connection can access information from all over the world in seconds.
The bottom line
We are entering a pivotal era. We are currently undergoing four profound shifts, that include changing patterns of demographics, migration, resources, and technology. The stress lines are already beginning to show, with increasing tensions over race and class as well as questions about the influence technology and institutions have over our lives.
Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
On a December day in 1968, an engineer named Douglas Engelbart launched a revolution. The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource-rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and avoid innovation mistakes.
Over the past 100 years, just about every business IBM has dominated has hit the skids. It was a pioneer in tabulating machines, mainframe computers, personal computers, and installed IT services, just to name a few. Nevertheless, every 20 years or so, each one of these businesses has been disrupted.
Yet still, IBM remains one of the most valuable companies in the world because it keeps developing new technologies. Today, as its business for installed solutions continues to decline, it’s building completely new businesses based on technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and neuromorphic chips.
The one absolute certainty about innovation is that you need to constantly feed your pipeline with new ideas or you will inevitably begin to decline.
Examining this work helped us consider mistakes that can kill the process of innovation.
His presentation that day would be so consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos. Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto, the first truly personal computer.
Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements of the Alto to create the Macintosh.
The process of innovation.
So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it?
Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the world? Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not mentioned here.
The truth is that there were many mistakes that could have killed the efforts of this cool innovation.
When most people think about innovation, they think about startups. And certainly, new firms like Uber, Airbnb, and Space X can transform markets. But others such as IBM, Procter and Gamble, and 3M have managed to stay on top for decades.
This happens even as competitors rise to challenge them and then, when markets shift, disappear just as quickly into oblivion.
It is true that small, agile firms can move fast, but larger enterprises have the luxury of going slow. They have loyal customers and an abundance of resources.
They can see past the next hot trend and invest for the long term. There’s a huge difference between hitting on the next big thing and developing it consistently, generation after generation.
Assuming innovation is a single event
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it wasn’t until 15 years later, in 1943, that the miracle drug came into widespread use. Alan Turing came up with the idea of a universal computer in 1936, but it wasn’t until 1946 that one was built and not until the 1990’s that computers began to impact productivity statistics.
We tend to think of innovation as arising from a single brilliant flash of insight, but the truth is that it is a drawn-out process involving the discoveries of many insights, the many components of the engineering solution and then the transformation of an industry or field.
That’s almost never achieved by one person or even within one organization.
Not asking the right questions
Too often, we treat innovation as a monolith, as if every problem was the same, but that’s clearly not the case.
In laboratories and factory floors, universities and coffee shops, or even over a beer after work, people are checking out better ways to do things. There is no monopoly on creative thought.
But that leads us to a problem: How should we go about innovation? Should we hand it over to the guys with white lab coats? An external partner? A specialist in the field? Crowdsource it? What we need is a clear framework for making decisions.
The best way to start is by asking the right questions: (1) How well is the problem defined? and (2) How well is the domain defined?
Once you’ve asked those framing questions, you can start defining a sensible way to approach the problem using the innovation matrix.
Clearly, no one method can suffice. Look at any great innovator, whether it is Apple, Tesla or Google, and you’ll find a portfolio of strategies.
So the first step toward solving a difficult problem is asking the questions you need to define your approach. To paraphrase Voltaire, if you need to solve a problem, first define your terms.
Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA was not achieved by simply plowing away at the lab, but by incorporating discoveries in biology, chemistry and x-ray diffraction to inform their model building.
Great innovation almost never occurs within one field of expertise but is almost invariably the product of synthesis across domains.
Not employing open innovation
When Microsoft launched Kinect for the Xbox in 2010, it quickly became the hottest consumer device ever, selling 8 million units in just the first two months. Almost immediately, hackers began altering its capabilities to do things that Microsoft never intended.
Instead of asking them to stop, it embraced the hackers, quickly releasing a software development kit to help them along.
Like Microsoft, many firms today are embracing open innovation to expand capabilities. Cisco outfoxed Lucent not by developing the technology itself, but by smartly acquiring startups.
Procter & Gamble has found great success with its Connect and Develop program, and platforms like Innocentive allow firms to expose thorny problems to a more diverse skill set.
Innovation process management.
As was the case with Alexander Fleming and penicillin, most firms will find that solving their most important problems will require the skills and expertise they don’t have.
That means that, at some point, they will need to utilize partners and platforms to go beyond their internal capabilities of technology and talent.
Forgetting about new business models
When Chester Carlson perfected his invention in 1938, he tried to market it to more than 20 companies but had no takers. It was simply far too expensive for the market.
Finally, in 1946, Joe Wilson, President of the Haloid Company, came up with the idea of leasing the machines instead of selling them outright.
The idea was a rousing success, and in 1948 the firm changed its name to Xerox.
The tricky thing about disruptive innovations is that they rarely fit into existing business models and so the value they create isn’t immediately clear.
Many people think of innovation as discarding the old to make room for the new, but as Bain & Co.’s Chris Zook points out in Profit From The Core, smart companies realize that the bulk of their profits will come from current lines of business.
Take Google for example. Yes, it pursues radical innovation, like self-driving cars, at itsGoogle X unit, but the continual improvement of its core search business is what made it the world’s most valuable company.
That’s why Google, as well as many other innovative companies, follow the 70/20/10 rule.
The premise of the rule is simple. Focus 70% of your resources in improving existing technology (i.e. search), 20% of adjacent markets (i.e. Gmail, Google Drive, etc.) and 10% on completely new markets (i.e. self-driving cars).
Forgetting about the synergy of numbers
It’s no accident that the people who would make the vision Engelbart presented at “The Mother of All Demos” a reality attended the event and knew Engelbart personally. In those days, it was difficult, if not impossible, to actively collaborate across time and space.
Take Apple’s App Store. It is, of course, a highly effective way for Apple’s network of customers to access functionality on their phones, but it also allows the firm to access the talents of literally millions of developers.
It’s hard to imagine any single enterprise, no matter how efficient or well organized, pulling off that kind of scale.
When we look back to the great innovations of the past, it hard not to wonder how it could’ve gone differently. What if chemists had picked up on Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in weeks rather than years?
How many lives could have been saved? Was there no one who could have helped develop Engelbart’s vision of the personal computer outside of Northern California?
And now, the problems we seek to solve are significantly more complex than in earlier generations. That’s one reason why the journal Nature recently noted that the average scientific paper today has four times as many authors as one did in 1950.
At the same time, knowledge has been democratized. A teenager with a smartphone today has more access to information than a highly trained specialist a generation ago.
Take a slightly broader view, and it becomes clear that innovation today goes far beyond research labs, Silicon Valley pitch meetings, and large corporate initiatives.
In 1977, a Harvard-trained psychologist named Keith Simonton, developed a theory that he called the Equal Odds Rule. “The Equal Odds Rule says that the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist’s average publication.” [4]
In other words, any given scientist is equally likely to create a game-changing piece of work as they are to create something average that is quickly forgotten.
Translated to the world-at-large: You can’t predict your own success. Scientists, artists, inventors, writers, entrepreneurs, and workers of all types are equally likely to produce a useless project as they are to produce an important one.
We all have something to offer and can add to the world’s knowledge in a way that may differ in degree, but not in kind, to the giants of the past.
The bottom line
Don’t let what you know … limit what you can imagine or maybe even a dream. Confidence never comes from having all the answers. It comes from being prepared for, and open to, new ideas and questions. Prepare your mind for new ways of thinking.
Only then will you take advantage of all the business lessons learned for the best innovative ideas.
As Robert Weisberg pointed out in his excellent book, Creativity: The Myth of Genius, great creative thinking arises out of rather ordinary thought processes. Genius is, of course, helpful, but not essential and many of those that are considered geniuses have fairly normal IQs.
So the secret to unlocking creativity and innovation is not grabbing for wild ideas or waiting for divine inspiration, but through knowing your field, defining good problems, taking useful ideas from separate domains, and tenaciously seeking out effective solutions. That’s within the reach of all of us.
Both innovation and creativity come from combining ordinary things in extraordinary ways.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of a business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
