Producing a torrent of new opportunities

Objectives

Create a torrent of new growth opportunities across product, market and industry spaces

Enhance your innovation pipeline Learn design rules to achieve this

Enlarge the pipeline

Building a high-yield process that generates and captures a flood of novell ideas

Three design rules Involve many minds Sow enough seeds Widen the front end

Enhance the pipeline

Improving the quality not just the quantity

Two design rules Increase the combinations Ideate around specific themes

I. INVOLVE MANY MINDS

The objective is to involve more and more minds in your company

Ask them for ideas

1. Cultivating innovators in your company

Wrong thinking: ordinary employees can not be source of innovation

Lack of mechanism within the companies to foster the innovation

Start: raise the ratio of innovators to the total number of employees

Send them the message that you expect they to generate new ideas

Innovation starts with me

2. Using the power of the net

To involve the employees in the process sharing ideas and thinking up new ideas

Use technology and internet

3. Look beyond your organization (1)

Ask the clients, suppliers and other partners

Give them an option to give you ideas

Use the Internet

The paths are different for different organizations (next slide)

3. Look beyond your organization (2)

Three factors on which you should base your approach: Your objectives Your industry's competitive dynamics Your company's strengths and scale

4. Energizing a community of volunteers Linux, Wikipedia, Google If you want to energize volunteers ask

the following questions: Who out there cares about the problems

my company cares about? What kind of investment in this community

will be required to build goodwill and trust What nonmonetary incentives might

engender the volunteers contributions? What mechanisms can we use to structure

their contribution

II. SOW ENOUGH SEEDS

Innovation is largely a numbers game. More ideas creates greater change successful ones to be created

Good example is the venture capital business

But some companies do not take that approach

II. SOW ENOUGH SEEDS

The real issue is not how many times you fail but the value of your success

You chance of finding the next big opportunity is largely a function of how many seeds you sow and how many new things you try

III. WIDEN THE FRONT END

You should not constraint the flow of new ideas entering at the front end

Eliminate the innovation myopia by considering the following categories:

Technology innovations, product innovations, service innovations, operational innovations, cost innovations, experience innovations, management innovations, business model innovations, industry innovations

IV. INCREASE THE COMBINATIONS

The game changing innovations are born at the intersection points between various types of insights Unexamined dogma Unexploited trends Underutilized competencies Unvoiced customer needs

Crash (combine) them

V. IDEATE AROUND SPECIFIC THEMES

Problem: boiling the ocean No -

The employees are already focused The ideas are connected to the real

world You can narrow the idea

Innovation challenge and leadership imperatives (1)

How can we increase the volume of ideas to consider?

Open up the ideation. Don't eject ideas at early stage Accept the idea of arithmetic

Innovation challenge and leadership imperatives (2) How do we improve the quality of the

ideas generated? Focus your ideation on specific platforms

or “aiming points” Generate ideas based on discovery

insights rather than unstructured brainstorming

Seek ideas at the “intersection” of various types of insights

Be specific when generating ideas Look for “open”market spaces