BQF Innovation Blog » ideas

Increase your Success – become an Ideas Carrier

Paul Sloane — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:45:44 +0000

You can increase your success in business if you can become an ideas carrier, someone who identifies, collects and communicates fresh ideas for other people’s business challenges. If you work in an office you can do this for your colleagues, your boss or the people who report to you. If you are a consultant or sales person you can do this for your customers. If you are a buyer you can do it for your suppliers. In every case you can build your relationship by helping the other person solve their problems.

Let’s say you are a salesman. Think of your most important customers. What are their most pressing business challenges? What are the top priorities and the worries that keep them awake at night? Forget for the moment about trying to sell them your products, focus instead on their problems and issues. Now as you go about the rest of your business look out for ideas that might help. Maybe when you are speaking to a colleague or another customer, or when you are reading a magazine or the internet you will see something that might possible be helpful. Send your customer an email with the link or a letter with the magazine clipping and a note saying, ‘I was thinking of the issue we discussed and saw this idea that I thought might help.’ Your customer may adopt or reject the idea for all sorts of reasons but the very act of making the suggestion serves some valuable purposes. First it reminds him about you. Secondly it shows that you are interested in solving his problems and not just in selling your products. Thirdly it gives you a good reason for a follow-up telephone call, ‘Was the idea useful?’ Similar considerations apply if you supply an idea for a manager in another department of the company. It raises your profile and shows you are a constructive, helpful kind of person. These are the sorts of considerations that can help your image and career.

To become an ideas carrier you need three things:

An interest in the challenges that other people face. You can find out about these with intelligent, sensitive questions. Most people are happy to open up about the business issues they face.
An open, inquiring mind. You need to be on the look out for new ways to do things and fresh ideas.
The willingness to offer the ideas, put them into context and communicate them in a positive manner.

You can build your success in business with a combination of three things. Firstly your understanding of the needs of the key people you meet. Secondly your industry knowledge and contacts with other people. Thirdly your imagination and ability to spot connections. You can construct your own unique selling proposition with this combination. By carrying innovative ideas from one place to another you can help your customers, build your relationships and advance your career.

Paul Sloane

Intensive Bottled Creativity

Paul Sloane — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:02:01 +0000

The next meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit will be an Ideas Jam on the morning of July 13th in central London. It will be fun, challenging, interactive, intensive and creative. You will learn new ideation methods, meet interesting people and work with them to develop radical ideas. It is open to members and non-members. Details and booking here.

Paul Sloane

Where are you most innovative – on your own or in a crowd?

Paul Sloane — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:10:13 +0000

There is an interesting blog on Zenhabits which looks at the habits of highly creative people. It finds that most of them rate solitude as the best way to find creative ideas. However others prefer the stimuation of participation in a group. When do you get your best ideas – when on your own or in a brainstorm or in some other situation?

Paul Sloane

Run Creative Ideas Events

Paul Sloane — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:42:46 +0000

If there is an important issue that needs some creative ideas then set a specific challenge for it and run an ideas event. A regular brainstorm or ideation meeting is fine but why not add some excitement with a different approach?

Here are the sorts of events you could run:

• A lunchtime brainstorm with pizza and drinks.

• A team contest where teams post ideas on an intranet site and everyone can vote for their favourite.

• A reality TV game show where people vote out the worst ideas and the number of contestants is whittled down to a winner.

• A party where people have to contribute ideas to get treats such as snacks and drinks.

• An ideas event where you bring in some external people to get diversity of thinking. They could be suppliers, customers, students or relatives of employees.

• An offsite event at a zoo, art gallery, museum, stately home or other interesting venue (but not a hotel – they are too dull)

Announce the challenge in specific terms and the criteria that will be used to select the best idea and then let the proceedings begin. Place a deadline on when ideas have to be submitted. That will help concentrate the mind. Also, show ideas that have already been submitted so as to avoid duplication. This also allows contributors to build on other people’s ideas.

The event needs proper facilitation with good brainstorming disciplines; no criticism, divergent thinking, going for quantity etc. Then the ideas need to be evaluated and the best ones actioned.

By running an event you focus attention and energy on the issue. People know that it is important and therefore they will make an effort. The event registers in their subconscious minds and the result should be a wealth of ideas. In addition the event will often be motivational, team-building and fun.

Paul Sloane
Destination Innovation

Is Brainstorming a Waste of Time?

Paul Sloane — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:03:03 +0000

Mark McGuiness on his blog, Lateral Action, asks the question, ‘Is brainstorming a waste of time?’ He produces a number of serious critics who hate brainstorms and claim that there is little evidence that they work. The main criticisms are:

Not enough good ideas

Lack of critical filters

Inhibition

Freeloading

Taking turns

Group think

He then introduce arguments from the believers in brainstorms who claim that a well-run brainstorm will produce good ideas. His conclusion is this;

‘brainstorming only makes a difference if it is part of a larger creative process, as you see at IDEO, Pixar, and other places that do real creative work. ‘

I disagree. I believe that a well-facilitated brainstorm will generally produce great ideas for a well stated problem. The question of whether individuals can produce better ideas on their own is beside the point. It is a bit like arguing that the 11 players in a soccer team would get more exercise if they all went jogging instead of playing soccer. The point is that both approaches are valid, worthwhile and different. They are both 100 times better than doing nothing!

Paul Sloane

P.S. There are more comments on this at the Mindjet blog.

Brainstorming – which approach works best?

Paul Sloane — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 10:02:50 +0000

There is an interesting post on some research on Brainstorming here on the Innovation Tools site. Josh Hyatt of the Sloan Management Review discusses some research by Karan Girotra, a professor at INSEAD, and Christian Terwiesh and Karl T. Ulrich, both professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

Two types of groups generated ideas. One followed a traditional model, assembling a group – in this case, students studying product design – and having them come up with appropriate product ideas for dorm rooms. They worked solely in a group. The other group took a hybrid approach: Those students worked on ideas by themselves before coming together to share their thinking.

Which technique yielded the best ideas? Strictly speaking, the traditional brainstorming groups came up with the very best ideas. They also came up with the very worst ones. In other words, their results’ quality varied much more than did the hybrid group’s results. The hybrid group produced more ideas that were, on average, of higher quality. But, as Girotra notes, “when it comes to innovation, the extremes are what matter – not the norm and not the average.” So, if both groups work for the same amount of time, the traditional brainstorming team “significantly outperforms” the hybrid group when it comes to producing the best ideas, according to the authors.

This finding contradicts most existing literature on the subject, which tends to conclude that while working in teams is more satisfying, working alone generates the most effective ideas. But “what we found makes sense, since the most successful creative firms do mostly use team processes for brainstorming,” Terwiesch says. “We just brought some new thinking to the subject.”

Full article on Innovation Tools.

Paul Sloane

SCAMPER – a powerful product innovation tool

Paul Sloane — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:03:01 +0000

One of the methods I teach on my Ideas Workshops is SCAMPER. It is a productive and versatile technique for examining a product or service from differing angles and for generating plenty of strongly innovative ideas. SCAMPER is an acronym and you ask the following types of question when you use this tool:

SUBSTITUTE – What elements of this product or service can we substitute?
COMBINE – How can we combine this with other products or services?
ADAPT – What can we alter or adapt it?
MAXIMISE OR MINIMISE – How can we greatly enlarge or greatly reduce any component?
PUT TO OTHER USE – What completely different use can we have for our product?
ELIMINATE – What elements of the product or service can be eliminated?
REARRANGE OR REVERSE – How can we rearrange the product or reverse the process?

Now I have found a site which enhances the tool and offers a range of supplementary resources. Luciano Passuello has posted a blog on SCAMPER together with a SCAMPER random question generator and a SCAMPER mindmap. If you want to use this tool in your next brainstorm meeting then these resources are highly recommended.

Paul Sloane

Customers can guide innovation

Paul Sloane — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:07:24 +0000

Customers can be an important source of innovative ideas. Many companies conduct conventional customer surveys and focus groups. These are useful channels of feedback but in terms of original ideas they are often disappointing. Customers are good at demanding incremental improvements in products, lower prices and better service but they are notoriously poor at predicting significant new products or innovations to meet their needs. Before the fax machine was invented who would have predicted he needed it? Which wearer of spectacles in the 1950s would have said that he wanted a lens to put on his eyeball or laser surgery to reshape his eye? You can expect customers to tell you that they want more of what you offer and they want it better, faster and cheaper. But do not count on them to tell you about different ways to meet their needs.

A more lateral approach to gain insights from customers is to study in detail how they use your type of product or service and to observe what practical problems they have.

Fluke Corporation of Seattle is noted for innovative hand-held measurement products. They sent teams of observers to watch maintenance engineers in chemical plants. They discovered that the engineers had to carry a variety of different instruments to calibrate different temperature and pressure gauges. They also noticed that after taking the calibration measurement the engineer would write the readings on a clipboard and then transcribe them into a computer. The process was time-consuming and prone to errors. Fluke therefore designed a new product that used flexible software to allow it to calibrate any gauge in the chemical plant. It also recorded the results, which could be directly downloaded to the engineer’s computer. The resulting product was the Fluke Document Process Calibrator, which became a great success.

Haier is a leading Chinese manufacturer of white goods such as freezers and cookers. Its engineers in rural China were surprised to find that people were using Haier washing machines to wash the vegetables they had grown in their gardens. Turning this unexpected use into a new application, the Haier development team came up with a new wash cycle designed specifically for vegetables. On another occasion a sharp-eyed engineer saw that a student had placed a plank between two Haier fridges to form a makeshift desk. The company responded by designing a fridge with a fold-out desktop - ideal for small rooms that need an extra table or desk top.

Asking customers for feedback is good but observing them can be much better. If you want to gain a march on the competition and design the products and services of the future watch your customers carefully. Look for the areas of unexpected use, the headaches and problems that want to be solved or the unusual combinations of needs or uses. They can give you the insights you need to generate successful innovations in products, services and processes.