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