Perpetual generation of good ideas is a critical part of the innovation process.
A Boston Consulting Group survey of organisations practicing innovation as a core part of their overall organisation strategy showed that 22% of these organisations believe that their innovation efforts are being stalled by a lack of great ideas.
So why do some organisations continuously generate good and transformational ideas that propel them to sustain their innovation performance, stay ahead of the competition and sometimes even disrupt the incumbent? Is it because they have employees that were born with an innate ability to come up with good ideas or their leaders are more creative in their genetic make-up and thus come up with ideas continuously? The answer is neither.
Whilst scientific studies have suggested that creative people have different brain activity that means their thinking is less inhibited and they are more likely to come up with more absurd, dreamlike and weird ideas than other people, the truth remains that, idea generation is more of a science than an art. As such, idea generation can rely on methods, frameworks and models, as well as hypothesis developed from industry signals. The most innovative organisations have understood this fact and thus invested in the process of learning how to come up with great ideas. Additionally, a lot of innovations are results of connecting dots or clustering smaller ideas or concepts to evolve with a transformational idea of a product, service or business model. A couple of examples of these are
The Sony Walkman. In 1978, one department of Sony was working on a small tape recorder for journalists and another department was building lightweight headphones for use with a home stereo. The combination became the Sony Walkman and revolutionized the industry.
Instant Photography. The ability to take a photo and see it within minutes was born out of the innocent/ignorant request of a three year old. During a vacation, Edwin Land took a picture of his three year old daughter. The girl immediately ran up to her father asking, can I see it, can I see it, why can’t I see it now? In that moment the idea of instant photography (what was later named Polaroid) was born in the mind of Edwin Land, at a time when all photographs had to be professionally developed and took days.
The truth is, nobody is born with good ideas or the natural instinct to continuously generate good ideas. Yes, people are sometimes inspired out of the blue in what is called an Aha moment. These are however few and far in-between and can neither be relied upon nor expected to help sustain innovation performance within organisations that wants to ensure its survival in the face of potential disruption. As such, organisations serious about innovation must invest in and expose its employees to methods for idea generation. Whilst many ideations techniques have been put forward, here we highlight three particularly strong approaches that can be used to generate ideas.
SCAMPER. SCAMPER is a very powerful tool that enables ideation, creativity and problem solving by providing a framework to brainstorm and investigate up to 7 possible ways to transform your product, service or business model into a new offering. SCAMPER represents a mnemonic as shown in diagram below
SCAMPER is used to seek out ways to innovate out of existing product, service or business model. Identify an existing Product, Service or Business Model that you either want to wring further value out of by improving it, or your customers are having problem with it and you need to solve the said problem.
Ensure to assemble a team that is very familiar with the product as well as one or two people who may not be so familiar so as to be able to introduce some off the wall thinking or idea, which may be clustered with more familiar ones.
Take the “Product” through each of the letter in the SCAMPER mnemonic. With each letter pose a different question that is related to the focus of the letter. Apply the questions to user perception of product or service, benefits, touch points, product attributes, pricing, market segment and any other related aspect you might be able to think of that has relevance to your need. Below are typical questions that can be used or modified for a SCAMPER brainstorming session.
Finally, look at the answers that you come up with. Does any stand out as viable solutions? Could you use any of them to create a new product, service or business model; or use them to develop an existing one? If any of your idea seem viable, then you can explore them further.
Seeking Value Denials or Value Gaps. Value Denial is a phrase first used by Richard Rumelt, Professor of Strategy at UCLA. Value Denials (or Gaps) are possible use cases that are both desirable and feasible but are not being supplied to the market in existing products or services. They can either be perceived or not perceived by the consumer. The concept combines insights into demand and potential supply. In effect, it is a dimension of performance that currently just isn’t supplied at any price. By uncovering value denials, valuable innovations can be born. The approach is used by taking existing product, services and business models and seeking out how additional value or new value can be developed around the same concept.
An example of value denial was the Sony Walkman, which in itself solved the value denial of portable music. However further value denials existed in the Sony Walkman. The first was a desire for further miniaturization and another was the desire to have significantly high volumes of songs accessible within the device. These value denials were both addressed by the iPod.
Another example of value denial, which is one Rummelt himself put forward in a McKinsey interview is as below
“A classic example is an airline ticket guaranteeing that your luggage will not be lost. It just isn’t supplied at any price. There must be a price at which airlines would hand-carry luggage to the baggage compartment and even a price at which they would strap it into the seat next to you! There are times when we would pay the premium, but those services are not offered. That’s a value denial.” – Richard Rummelt
Structured Idea Management (SIM). SIM is the process of explicitly managing the idea generation and selection process. Whilst Seeking Value Denials & SCAMPER are approaches that can be carried out individually, SIM is a team effort. SIM as a methodology, has stood the test of time. Canon used SIM in the 1980s and was the methodology behind their design of new consumer cameras in the 1990s. SIM will enable your organisation to quickly and efficiently transition from raw ideas to structured concepts. You can either use SIM from the idea generation stage onwards or use it for ideas that have already been generated (using other methodology such as SCAMPER, Value Denials etc.) and require screening, ranking and final selection.
When practicing SIM, the objective should be to
- Explicitly manage/control the environment to ensure maximum possible creativity
- Employ the best and most rigorous screening and ranking mechanisms to extract the highest quality ideas and output
- Recognise and capitalize on the opportunity for creative bundling or clustering of idea fragments to create breakthrough concepts – similar to the Sony Walkman or Instant Photography examples above
SIM should be practiced in a sequential 7-stage process as shown below.
To get the best out of SIM, there must be attention to detail at each step. Each step is crucial in getting the desired result and as such you must avoid taking shortcuts.
Additionally, to ensure commitment to the concepts at the end of the process, the team should consist of key personnel that will be involved in taking the concepts through development and commercialisation.
Dive Deeper to understand how to practice SIM methodology
The above methodologies are powerful approaches to idea generation (and screening and selection in the case of SIM) for driving and sustaining innovation efforts.
Organisations that are to sustain innovation must continually generate and manage their ideas.