How to innovate

Innovation has a recipe. Here is how it works

It’s tempting to think of innovation as a “flash of inspiration” – a blinding idea – a lightbulb going off.  However – counterintuitively – many of the most innovative and imaginative teams and companies use a structured and deliberate process to innovate; a process that starts not with an idea, but with a problem.

We can see this structure below in the clip from IDEO, which shows their innovation DeepDive process applied to the problem of innovating the humble Shopping Trolley.

Notice how they go through several deliberate steps in their Deep Dive – a process similar to our Business Driven Action Learning Innovation process. The steps are

1) Identification of the problem
2) Data gathering around the problem
3) Sharing and consolidation of the findings and re-definition of the problem
4) Idea creation and mock-up
5) Idea combination
6) Solution testing

Note how they spend the enitre first day just working on the problem, long before any ideas are generated.

The ground rules are interesting;

• Stay focused on topic
• One conversation at a time
• Encourage wild ideas
• Build on the ideas of others
• Defer judgment

Note also the deliberate time pressure, and listen to the summary at the end.

Innovation has a recipe. It can be deliberate. It can be structured. Don’t wait for inspiration to strike – go out there and hunt it down.