How to Innovate in an Ever Changing Market?

Some months ago I heard an innovation manager saying: “For the moment, we have enough ideas in our innovation funnel, so thanks but no thanks. We don’t need a flow of new ideas.”

His confidence triggered my curiosity.

It was clear that the company had done its research, did some brainstorm meetings and wrote down a few innovation projects for the upcoming years.

The next steps in the innovation process were clearly defined: they were going to build the product, attract test users and gather feedback by using an online survey (it’s easy to set up, you get your data directly on a sheet, they say).

With this feedback, they would refine their product and ship it into market.

Questions kept popping in my head: how do you know this is going to work? What do you do when the market changes in the meanwhile? Should we stop innovating and stop rethinking our business until these innovation projects are build?

Desperately in need for answers to these questions I went to, what another attendee called on Twitter “The Tomorrowland of all conferences”: the Creativity World Forum.

And let’s be clear: if you want to survive in these era of radical change, I think you should attend the conference at least once too.

“75% of the innovative energies of people are wasted,” – Tom Kelley

And that’s a lot of innovation potential that gets lost. And it’s a lot of answer to the questions I was dealing with too. The innovation manager was wrong.

Creativity and innovation should be a continuous process and this untapped potential should be unleashed.

Just think where your competition would stand if you used 75% more of your innovation potential?

To accomplish this, Tom Kelley suggested to CEOs to keep the existing business structures for communication and decision-making, but to search for a way to make the ideas flow up and down throughout the hierarchy.

A ‘pirate team’ which does not have to go through all hierarchical layers could be a solution.

“Don’t rely on ROI when choosing between innovative ideas,” – Frans Johansson

Ok so we want to unleash this innovation potential. Does it mean we should involve everyone for a brainstorm during the ideation phase?

We should start ‘squinting’ more and should lower the barriers to express a new idea.

Debra Kay was very clear: stop brainstorming. Great ideas pop-up during the so-called ‘Alpha Brainwaves’, when your mind is at rest. Being creative is the result of simple actions:

• Try new things and think like a traveler.
• The world is connected, but someone has ever made these connections. In other words, innovation is about connecting existing dots.
• Steal, but don’t copy. So, we have some fresh, potentially innovative ideas now.

At this stage, we don’t have any clue whether an idea could lead to a business or successful innovation project. How can we validate the potential?

In big companies, lots of innovation ideas are eliminated throughout the decision making process.

Guy Kawasaki showed us two factors that are crucial when validating if an innovative idea could be a potential business: uniqueness combined with value.

Having a product or service that creates value, but isn’t unique could be a potential business.

But you will always be competing on price. The other way around, having a unique product or service that does not create value is just a hobby.

“Don’t worry, be crappy,” – Guy Kawasaki

At this stage, we unleash a natural human ability to come up with fresh and validated ideas. Equally important is the courage to act on the idea.

And this was the moment when my second question became answered: execution of ideas isn’t about building your idea, testing and shipping.

Often, companies create a large goal based on an idea and spend 100% of their resources to execute it.

Many times, they only realize afterwards, when they are out of budget or resources, how they should have done it or what their product or service should have looked like.

Execution of ideas starts with developing the smallest executable step. Test it as soon as possible in the market, rethink it and pivot your idea until you found your perfect match with your customers. So don’t worry to be crappy at first.

The end of big data?

You build a ‘minimal viable product’ and test it fast in the market. So the innovation manager said: “let’s do an online survey to gather feedback and see what results come out of the data.

Let that be one of the biggest mistakes a lot of people make: customers don’t say what they really want, because most of the time they don’t know what they want themselves.

When you execute and test an idea, you should always start with empathy. Especially for young professionals it’s important to get out of your desk and gather ‘current insights’.

Because that’s the only way you can differentiate and convince experienced people, who càn base their judgment on ‘past insights’, to change course when necessary.

As customers don’t know what they want, you should go out there, literally, and do what Tom Kelley called Design Research.

Because empathy is a gateway to better and sometimes surprising insights that can help distinguish your idea or approach.

And that’s what Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari did…

With an idea to aggregate news online, these two college students went out there and settled at a coffee bar in Sao Paolo where they were writing and revising code for 10 hours a day.

For them, this was not just a coffee bar, it was their test lab, handing out an iPad which included the first versions of their news aggregator app to customers for their immediate feedback.

Although they almost got kicked out of the coffee shop, that intense product development cycle combined with the contextual interviews proved invaluable.

Their idea is now the well-known news aggregation app Pulse, which was sold three years later to LinkedIn for 90 million dollar.

“The only thing that differentiates people from robots is intuition,” – Ricardo Semler

Does empathy also apply for big corporations? Ricardo Semler was right.

The temptation of big corporations to depersonalize customers might seem useful for understanding data. But this does not work well when designing for real people.

“The more you use the word ‘innovation’, the less meaning it gets,” – Daan Roosegarde

With these wise words I end this blogpost. Want to talk about your ideas? Or are you looking for a marketing and sales consultant? Contact 4P square, we can help you to connect the dots.