Fresh Takes on Innovation

Here your pictures come alive: Search for a picture online, klick on “montage” and watch a new picture unfold that is made up of all the pictures that come up for your search. Under Advanced Options you can have more influence on the outcome. Enjoy! Montage-a-google.

Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley Entrpreneur and former Apple Evangelist involved in several hot Web-Startups (Coghead, Truemors, Jajah etc.) shares his view about innovation at the 2007 Event Marketing Conference.

He has some good points about transforming ideas into business. Innovation polarizes people and you should not be afraid of this, he states. Be more afraid of “Bozos”, those guys who keep saying it can’t be done, shouldn’t be done, and isn’t necessary - not recognizing the potentials of revolutionary products or services.

More: The Art of Innovation-article on Guy Kawasaki’s blog

When collecting inspirations, chaos should be part of the process. Chaos is a source of the new.

Though it looks pretty much like the Rorschach inkblot test, BrainSplash, as we call one of our creativity tools, is not about a personality test. The random shapes, colors and patterns are inspiring. New thoughts and connotations bubble up: Raw material which will be refined and compressed later on in order to become new ideas. We often use it in name finding processes because the emerging shapes create new inspirations for names, but the tool can also be used in product and service development as one trigger to come up with new fragments of thought.

…according to a Business Week Special Report are: Apple, Google, Totota Motor, General Electric and Microsoft. The Top 50 List might be a little US-focused, but is worth looking at.

The correspondent article about The World’s Most Innovative Companies underlines the need for new business models and organizations that are capable of sustained innovation.

Getting people to step out of their comfort zones can do a lot in sparking new ideas. But if they’re not paired with more fundamental changes, all those efforts will lead nowhere.

This development has to be driven by the leaders, not R&D-departments. Innovation touches the whole organisation, and thus, the whole organisation must adapt to constant change.

Innovation also requires inspired leadership. Executives must free up resources to execute new ideas and have the courage to take risks rather than just talk about their importance.

Save energy by switching off all non-essential electronic devices when leaving the house. Brilliant idea, isn’t it?

Source: Yankodesign

In March 2004, the Danish government has gone through a process to formulate a vision and strategy for Denmark to become a truly innovative society. The paper talks about important points to make a society more flexible and ready for innovation. A flexible labour market, for instance, certainly helps. Incentives to use new technologies can be another helper. An education system that generates not only relilable workforce but true innovators, is another important pillar. I think that education, in fact, is key to drive innovation. If a society does not create opportunities for innovation as early as with toddlers, it will miss the chance of a whole generation developing truly innovative products, services in the future. I congratulate the Danes for discussing these important issues. Infact, each society should do it urgently.

Every person involved in generating ideas for clients has had the same frustrating experience over and over again: It is both extremely important to get a good briefing for your task as well as extremely difficult.

Our clients know so much about their products that they often just do not see the forest for the trees. We, as external people, can challenge them to come up with the useful information we need in order to do a good job:

1. Get a good description of the current situation they are in, how they arrived there and why they are sure that their picture is correct
2. Get a clear description of the goal they would like to achieve in general and what the idea generating process should do for that goal (is the ideageneration process trying to reach the goal or is it rather one puzzle piece on the long way to reach it? Both answers are OK, but we need to know!)
3. What are the criteria against which the ideas will be measured later (eg. implementable next year, low cost, customer focus etc.)

Only, and only if you get at least this, you can be really sure to do a good job in coming up with ideas, no matter what process you use.

It becomes even more difficult when clients have to learn to do these three steps for themselves. They in general assume that everyone in the organisation already knows all this, and thus, why even bother to discuss it? But when you have to come up with ideas internally, you have to go through exactly the same briefing process as when working with external help, whether Ideafactories, agencies or consultancies.

Trust me.

Forbes.com asked 95 CEOs to name the one device they wish somebody would invent. The answers ranged from feasible technologies far out into utopia: Computer chips that plug directly into your brain, a time machine, the youth fountain, the ultimate all-in-one-gadget… Check out the Fifteen Things We Wish Someone Would Invent.

On www.idea-a-day.com, people can just post an idea. Any idea, really. It’s quite random and not very focused, but you can subscribe to their newsletter and get a new idea every day. Today, for instance, there an idea was posted about dishwashers. “Install kitchen storage units that double as dishwashers. Put dishes in in the cabinets dirty, press a button and they are washed and dried right where they belong”. Hey, why not? On the other hand, if you are a company that produces dishwashers, wouldn’t it be much more helpful to get 30 or 40 ideas about the future of your product, instead of only one?

Nice little card trick? Watch carefully