Fresh Takes on Innovation

When talking about Innovation and the crucial factors for a company becoming more innovative, there are three key ingredients we have discovered need to be in balance:

Obviously, you need a framework or process to make sure that great ideas can be captured and also actively developed within the organisation. There are a number of processes or frameworks, and to pick the right one depends on your current needs, size, culture and other factors, but it is clear that in order to create great content you need to have an underlying system that can be followed and understood by everyone in the organisation.

No matter how fantastic the stuff is that you create using that framework or process, you also need two other key ingredients: Awareness and an enabled team. Both ingredients are cultural and are crucial for your innovation success.

Let’s first talk about enabling, because it seems more obvious. You need to enable each individual in the organisation to use the framework or process and to be able to take on the right roles at the right times. There are people providing the process, others preparing the different steps or stages that lead to implemented ideas and ultimately to innovation, and the ones that participate in different process steps.

It is important that each individual on the team understands what their role(s) can be and what their responsibilites are when taking on that role. For instance, a person that participates in a process should know that his or her ideas are welcome, no matter how small, silly or indadequate they may seem at that moment. At the same time, people providing the process should know that they should refrain from coming up with ideas themselves, but rather provide the right framework in which the idea community can come up with suggestions. This provides a very agile environment in which ideas can grow.

Of course, enabling also involves just plain learning about the tools that are used in the process, how to use them and how to contribute a maimum of results in the process.

With awareness, the story is rather different and not so obvious. In our work during the last 21 years we have met many organisations that had the need to create great content, and they also provided the enabling factors for the team to make use of them, but somehow the ideas that were generated in the process were not implemented, or just the most boring ideas were implemented, or they were implemented halfheartedly. What had happened? Why did these teams not take action on the great ideas they had created in the process?

It took a long time until we realized that these teams were missing the third key ingredient: The awareness that indeed, if they wanted to innovate, they had to be prepared for drastic change. They needed to see that it was not enough to come up with great ideas, they also had to overcome the angst of taking action on those ideas by implementing them. This third, very human factor, is crucial in achieving real innovation culture that does not just involve processes and skills, but also an open mind and a sense of urgency for change.

Whenever we work with companes who are looking to create innovation, even if they “just” order an idea for a new name, we work hard to make sure that all three key ingredients are a part of the process we go through together, because only then innovation will get implemented and lead to success in the market.

At BrainStore, we believe that in order to create successful innovation, the process of coming up with ideas and the decision about which ideas will be implemented has much to do with the right roles and the right process. Today, we would like to look at the roles in our Idea Factory Process. The role model of our process has always been the classical production factory. In a factory, clear roles are assigned to different people in order to guarantee the quality of the resulting product. When it comes to great ideas (that will also be successfully implemented), we believe a similar system of checks and balances is helpful.

Firstly, we are convinced that there is a difference between the people who are steering the innovation process and the ones participating in it. We call them Innovation Team (the ones who steer the process) and Creating Community (the participants). By making this distinction, it becomes possible to steer an innovation process in a more systematic way, because the people who are responsible for the process are not producing the ideas themselves, and the people participating in the process do not need to worry about how the process is actually run. This way, the process is more efficient and the results are more broadly accepted.

Now let’s have a closer look at the people who are responsible for making an innovation process successful. There are 5 different roles. Two of the people (Head of Innovation and Innovation Promotion) are more auxiliary to the innovation culture and the relationship with clients (whether those clients are internal or external clients is not important), and three roles (the ones we will describe in more detail right now) are responsible for the whole process of developing ideas and bringing them to the point of implementation.

The first role is the Process Manager: He or she is responsible for steering the process, for ensuring the communication between the project owner (client) and the other members of the innovation team, and for making sure that the quality of the content is exceeding the clients expectations.

The Content Manager is responsible for setting up the search fields and methods for the idea generation and idea compression process, for monitoring the content, working together with internal or external people who ensure the process is running smoothly and for doing editorial work on the content that is generated in the process.

The Community Manager makes sure that for each process, the right community of participants is coming together to work on the project question. He or she is responsible for a balanced mix of participants, for their motivation and remuneration and for communicating the results (in accordance with the client) to the community.

At each process step, one of the innovation team members has the lead, while the others check the results. This way, quality is monitored and there is no risk that the content or the process deviate from the project objectives.

As a company that works with a lot of big organizations, we often don’t get the chance to share the results of our Idea Events.  Sometimes we get to talk about specific products and services that came about as a result of working with us – but we rarely get to give people a real glimpse into how our process unfolds.

But today we do!  Last month, BrainStore was one of the sponsors of  the Young Hoteliers Summit (YHS), a new hospitality conference put on by the Career Club of the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne (an internationally-renowned Swiss hotel school). As part of our contribution to the event, we ran the attendees through our Idea Factory process to come up with solutions to one of the challenges faced by luxury hotels today.

The Young Hoteliers Summit and Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne are graciously allowing us to share all their inspirations, raw ideas, the top 10 finished ideas and the results of their Idea Selection.

So, if you’d like to get a glimpse of the amazing results of one of our Idea Events, read on!

The Challenge

The Jumeirah Group, another sponsor of the event, proposed the following challenge to the attendees of the Young Hoteliers Summit:

“In the face of an overall decrease in demand, how to boost occupancy levels in luxury hotels without pushing prices lower?”

From that challenge, BrainStore developed a series of thought-provoking questions and criteria to come up with 10 great ideas.

The Process

We started by leading the students through one of our Creative Teams.  Creative Teams are the part of our process where we do quick, short exercises that result in thousands of “inspirations” rapidly.  We call the results of those sessions “inspirations” because – while they might not be a full idea in their own right – each inspiration has the potential to become, or inspire an actual idea later on in our process.

To get those inspirations, we first asked questions that don’t require a lot of thought, but require participants to consider different viewpoints.  Those included:

What do millionaires expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?

What do business travelers expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?

What do sporty people expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?

Then we moved onto more challenging questions that require participants to stretch their brains, such as:

How can one positively surprise various customer groups, in a way that leaves a lasting impression?

Imagine you are living in prohibitive times – alcohol has recently been outlawed – You are a wine merchant, and you must now find a way to continue selling your exclusive alcohol despite the ban.  How can you do this?

How do get your guests to feel completely comfortable in your hotel? Pay special attention to the five senses.

Through those questions, and the others that we rapid-fired at participants, we gathered over 2500 inspirations!

If you’d like to see the questions we asked and the responses, take a look at our records from the Creative Team:

(FYI, those results are rough – the goal for participants were to get as many inspirations as quickly as possible.)

After the Creative Team, we then moved onto the next part of our process: the Idea City.  In the Idea City, BrainStore pushed the YHS participants to combine all the inspirations generated in the Creative Team – and to turn those into fresh new ideas. During this phase, we still give participants challenges to think about, but now they have the time to create concrete ideas.

The ideas generated during this phase ranged from tempting guests with sensory experiences like baking bread in the morning, to providing above-and-beyond services such as adapter plugs (for travelers from different countries), to giving guest the ability to customize their rooms before they even arrive (like rock stars!)

The Idea City is a little more relaxing than the Creative Team – but all the brains in the room were obviously working madly away!  We had nearly 500 raw ideas come out of the Idea City.

Take a look at the raw ideas:

The Results

After the crazy inspiration generating of the Creative Team, and the quieter idea-generation of the Idea City, we hung up all the ideas and let the students pick their favorites.  This is always a favorite part of the Idea Event because participants get to see the results of their labor.  Plus, it’s a lot of fun to see the wide variety of ideas!

Then, we gave the students a little break while we evaluated their top ideas based on criteria and then put the top 10 ideas into a visual format so they could be easily understood and compared with each other.

After that, the Idea Selection began.  We turned on some fun music and projected the top 10 ideas in front of the participants from the YHS.  It was fun, and quick – with music (of course!)  We kept things moving because we didn’t want participants to overanalyze each idea (that comes later in a normal process during the Roadmap workshop) we just wanted to learn their initial impressions.

Meanwhile, in the background, we were crunching the students’ ratings of the ideas to find out what ideas were liked by all, and also which ideas were liked by some and hated by others.  (Those polarizing ideas are incredibly important to us!)

And then, in less than a day, it was done!  We compiled a document with the top ideas and showed how participants viewed their viability.

If you’d like to see the final results of our Idea Event for the Young Hoteliers Summit, with the top 10 ideas and how the students ranked them, check them out here.

Normally, this wouldn’t be the final stage of our Idea Event.  We typically helps companies thoroughly evaluate each idea with the help of experts, and then run a Roadmap workshop where the leaders of the company determine which ideas should be implemented, in what order and what resources/partnerships they need to make it happen.

In that way, we ensure that ideas generated with BrainStore don’t simply disappear into thin air – unlike many ideas that get pushed aside when other commitments get in the way.

But in a short workshop like this one for the Young Hoteliers, the process we described above gave the participants (and their sponsors) a series of great new ideas, a big gain in enthusiasm for solving challenges in their industry and many innovative building blocks and raw ideas to work with in the future.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the BrainStore process!

Every single week we visit companies in Switzerland and Germany, sometimes also in other parts of the world, and we often hear a variation of what we like to call the “we have more than enough ideas” myth, a story that is told to us by decision makers in companies of all sizes and industries. It is told in different variations, of which the most common one is something like the following:

In our company, we actually do not have a problem with generating ideas. We have so many ideas that we do not know which ones to implement or we have problems with the implementation of ideas that are new in general, because we face internal resistance in many cases.

It is, of course, true, that in all companies new ideas are constantly generated in one way or the other. New ideas for products are discussed in meetings, new improvement for processes are suggested by people who use them, and clients come with needs and ideas that will help them do better business.

Still, the question is: Are the ideas that are developed in this way truly relevant? Are they the most innovative ideas that can be generated? And to which question are these ideas an answer?

You see, the problem with “free floating” ideas like the ones described is that they are not rooted within strategy and they are not generated in a systematic way with a carefully chosen set of participants. And this, ultimately, is also the reason that implementation of these ideas often seems difficult, time consuming, expensive etc. Needless to say that if ideas are driven by individuals, it is always also a political choice which ideas should be implemented and which ones do not deserve another minute of attention.

So our answer to companies and organisations that say “we have more than enough ideas, we just do now know which ones to implement” is to say:

- Please set up a structured innovation management in your company. This can be a process like the Idea Factory process and software that BrainStore uses, and we are happy to provide the training for your team.

- Use this process to work on truly strategic projects, generating ideas for clearly targeted questions, not general ideas for your business

- Work together with internal and external people in this process, do do not just rely on the ideas from within your organisation, but invite your clients, partners and lateral thinkers into the process

- Dare to share ideas with others and improve them by having ongoing discussions about them with a diverse set of people.

If you follow these few suggestions, you will still have lots of ideas, and you still will not be able to implement all of them, but you will know exactly which ones to implement, how, and when. And you will face a lot less resistance, because you have integrated all relevant stakeholders into the process. Sounds easy? It is.

This fun commercial sent to us from Japan shows people at the moment of inspiration in their everyday lives.

The commercial shows people being inspired in bed, in the park, in the WC, in-transit, at the beach and even in board meetings.

What’s really remarkable about this commercial though is how similar it is to the grumpy thinker who stars in the first part of the presentations we give about BrainStore!

Check out some of our images for where people get ideas:

And, we both have the same conclusions: that it’s much better to be proactive and actively try to get ideas than to just wait for creative inspiration.

Of course, our solutions are a little different!  In the commercial, the solution to lacking inspiration is a stick of gum.  Here at BrainStore, our solution is the Idea Machine – which seems like a much more reliable method of ensuring results!

At Brainstore, we have a special liking for ideas that incite controversy.  Whenever we see an idea that half the groups hates, we know it’s a good one.  Even if that idea isn’t adapted, by simply including it in the discussion, we can often open up the group’s thinking to totally new horizons.

A recent article from the New York Times is one of those ideas.  In it, the author proposes that if we want humans to travel to Mars in the near future, we should send them on a one-way trip!

While it sounds like an awful idea at first, the article points out that there are benefits to sending astronauts only one-way.  It would be significantly cheaper and would move up human-travel to Mars by decades (at least).   It could even be staffed by  aging scientists who dreamed of going to space their entire lives, thought their chances were over and who would be thrilled to “boldly go where no one has gone before”.  It would let astronauts build-up a sustainable colony on Mars where other humans could eventually live – and the technology to make the return journey could be built there for future two-way travel.

See how considering a “ludicrous” idea can actually lead to new paths of thinking?  The first idea might never pan out… but by simply considering it, we end up looking at the challenge from a new angle.

Here at BrainStore we are very proud to present a new set of products that will help our customers become the innovation leaders in their industry. We now offer four different products that can be closely linked in a modular way to form a powerful innovation management for organisations and corporations.

First of all, there is our Idea Factory platform, a fully web based solution to create ideas across the organisation while inviting people from the outside into the process. It reflects our process that has been created over 20 years and helps companies to innovate at high speed.

Then there is training. We train teams and companies in innovation processes with our method and software and help companies to build up their own innovation processes that are in line with their culture and needs.

Our proven Idea Events (over 1′000 projects!) are still around, helping clients to generate great ideas with people from within the organisation and without in a day or two, while drastically changing the way the organisation deals with innovation.

Our fourth product category is a magic box full of tools and processes to support, enhance or boost your innovation department and to support your process where you most need it.

With our new product portfolio, we now cater to all the needs of our customers when it comes to innovation. Find out more on our web site

decompose the problem to solve it!

Today I attended a meeting of a small company that wanted to find a solution on how to find new clients. They were trying to have a brainstorming session on this question and (not much to my surprise) started struggling with it, becoming entangled in a very unstructured discussion. Soon they were so deep in the jungle of their problem that they were unable to find a way out.

What had happened? It is fairly simple: They had been staring the problem in the face without looking at it with more distance. This is a typical mistake when people try to generate ideas. But what is the solution. Simple, buit it needs a fair amount of training: Instead of trying to solve the question, first de-compose the question and work on subquestions.

For instance, if you are trying to find new clients, here are just a few examples of what you might want to look at:
- potential channels of communication
- different target audiences
- strengths in working with current clients
- totally whacky ideas on how to get meetings with potential clients
- ideas for mailings
- how are other companes finding new clients
- etc.

The difference is that you first look at subquestions to your greater problem, and that gives you the possibility to build great ideas using that raw material.

Another issue is who you involve in the generation of ideas, but this is yet another subject that we will need to discuss later.

There is an African saying: If you want to eat an Elephant, you have to cut it in small pieces. It’s the same with ideas, really.

Look at this video about a project for Zappos Showroom done by Stanford design students. What I like about this way of showing an idea is that it actually shows the full interactivity of a future website by using simple, everyday materials and a narrator. The idea is immediately understandable and you can much better understand it than if it were presented with stills or screenshots. And I bet that doing it was fun, too!

sticky ideas

The tricky thing with new ideas is that they are very elusive and easily dismissed as compared to old, known ideas that stick in people’s minds and habits.

So this is my own personal recipe to make new ideas stick within the organization.

1. make yourself acquainted with the culture in the organization. You need to learn the way people argue for ideas, how they communicate with each other and how they deal with the “new” in general to be prepared to sell your idea.

2. For a new idea to succeed, you need accomplices. In general, there are three types of potential accomplices in the organization that you can work with to sell your idea:

a) the professional / expert. You need people who will help you with the “proof of concept”, who will waiver all the “is this even feasible” talk and who can back you up on the more technical side of things

b) the organizational expert. Usually these people are found in HR or related departments and know exactly how the organization works. Who needs to be convinced of what, how and most importantly, when?

c) The motivators: People who can motivate other people to move in a new direction, who are role models and users of new technology and new tools, can help you sell your idea.

Find these people within the organization and make them your accomplices.

3. Do not present one idea. Present many solutions to a problem. If your idea is a new specific product, for instance, do not try to sell that product, but talk about the need to add new products to the portfolio in general and then engage as many stakeholders as possible in the dialogue about what that new potential product could be. Talk about criteria, about goals, about new markets, about the customers need, etc. On the one hand, you will then be able to talk about your specific idea in a context, on the other hand, it might very well be the case that your idea gets much better by the additional input, and it might even be the case (I consider it to be very likely) that you find many other product ideas that are at least as good as yours. This will give everyone the chance to choose the best solution instead of just having one idea to deal with, that can be easily dismissed. Most importantly, the idea will now be the idea of the entire team and not the idea of one individual.

4. If you have more than one idea, be prepared to visualize them in a comparable way so people actually get a chance to compare them with each other and to choose the best solution in a structured way.

5. If your idea (or a variation or alternative of said idea) is accepted, you need to go on a campaign for this idea. Having been accepted does not mean that it is implemented; people may not even remember it in a week. Use all the materials you have gathered in the process to make the idea stick. Invent a claim, a logo, a motivational quote or whatever you might need to make the idea stick. Be prepared to talk about it every minute of every day. Remember “Yes, we can?”. That is a powerful idea, but it needed to be repeated over a long period of time to become truly sticky in everyone’s mind.

6. Use your accomplices (see point 2) and your knowledge about the organization (see point 1) to steer the implementation of the idea in the right direction.

7. Talk about the idea as if it were already a reality. This will help people see it as something that will truly be there in a short while and not just a fantasy that you have.

8. Celebrate milestones: Make sure that every significant move towards the implementation is celebrated or at least mentioned publicly. This will make your idea truly stick.