Finding Your Innovation Inspiration

Innovation is the driving force behind business. For many people it’s the reason they started a company altogether. There’s a thrill in thinking up the next big idea, and breathing life into a product or service that revolutionizes the way we think and live. Then again, innovation doesn’t always have to be HUGE, as long as you’re solving a problem or meeting a need in a new way it still counts.

No matter how you define it, innovation begins with the germ of an idea. Genius is not required, rather all you need do is drop your pre-conceived notions, and open yourself up to new experiences. Here are a few ideas to get your brain matter sparking:

1) Start with yourself. Keep a notepad in your pocket and make a note of everyday products or tasks that either frustrate you, or take up an absorbent amount of time. If it’s causing you headaches, chances are you’re not alone.

2) Look to your hobbies. Look and the tools used and products you buy for your hobbies. Why do you like them? What makes them better then the ones you don’t buy? Can they modified and applied to a different industry?

Nurturing Innovation Within Your Small to Medium Sized Business

Innovation is the lifeblood a company.  As such, small business owners and executive managers at larger companies spend considerable time searching for the next big thing, the next product or service that will propel growth.  While this particular role is assigned to a few individuals within the company, a decentralized approach might yield more innovative opportunities.  Instead of searching for innovations, perhaps a company’s top management should instead search for individuals within the company who may be innovative.

In this month’s edition of the Harvard Business Review, Jeffery Cohn, a leadership assessment and succession planning expert at Spencer Stuart, and Jon Katzenback and Guz Vlac, partners consulting firm Katzenback Partners, discuss the systematic search for innovators in their article Finding and Grooming Breakthrough Innovators.  The article is a byproduct of their study on the innovative strategies employed by 25 organizations across multiple industry.  Key findings are that successful companies have established policies to support innovation and that these policies typically involve four steps.

You Don’t Need A Great Idea To Start A Business: Just Start.

Coming up with a winning idea for a new product or service is one of the most difficult things to do.  If you already have an idea, great, but what if you don’t?  Despite what some experts might suggest, launching a successful business without an idea can work.  Hewlett Packard is the best known example of this in action.  Just look at HP’s initial business plan.

Another example is Sony.  When Masaru Ibuka started Sony, he didn’t have a specific product in mind.  In his book Made in Japan, Akio Morita, one of Sony’s first employees, recalls discussing possible business ideas in a conference room shortly after the company’s founding. In fact Sony’s first two products (a rice cooker, and then tape recorder) failed in the marketplace.

Process Need: Drucker’s Third Source of Innovative Opportunity

Approximately 1700 years ago, Plato wrote, “A need or problem encourages creative efforts to meet the need of solve the problem.”  Twenty-three years ago in 1985, Peter Drucker wrote about need as one source of innovative opportunity.  And this year, Guy Kawasaki tells aspiring entrepreneurs to “build something you want to use.”  I’m sure 100 years from now, another influential business leader will say the same.  Clearly, necessity will always be the mother of all innovation.

One of the beauties of necessity-based problems is that they are obvious.  Everyone in a given field is aware of the problem, and as soon as viable solution arrives, it quickly becomes the standard.  They are adopted precisely because those within the industry / sector / profession understand the problem well.  The only caveat is that these innovations must fit with the way people already work and think.  If the innovation requires a great deal of change, then it is likely to meet with heavy resistance.   Siphs - A Life Science Research Community, the first project Tom and I launched, met with resistance for this exact reason.

The Unexpected & Unplanned For Success (Part II)

This post is a continuation of The Unexpected & Unplanned For Success (Part I)

Identifying & Responding To Unexpected Success

Identifying the unexpected success is likely the first challenge we as business builders face.  With respect to existing businesses, Drucker states that unexpected success events go unnoticed because “existing reporting systems do not as a rule report it, let alone clamor for management’s attention.”  Market analysis and management reports therefore need to be tailored to identify these opportunities.  In addition to focusing on area of under-performance, management reports could also include areas of over-performance.  They could ask, why did product or service xyz exceed both the company’s quantitative and qualitative performance metrics (financial, etc) ?

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