Before you innovate, educate: 5 ways to get your “innovation education”

Innovation is becoming harder to achieve. That’s the view held by 76% of U.S. business executives in the “GE Global Innovation Barometer” for 2016.

What makes innovation more of a challenge today?

According to the GE survey of 2,748 innovation-focused execs, 60% say the biggest hurdle is coming up with “radical and disruptive ideas.”

In addition, 66% of U.S. execs surveyed said their companies want to embrace innovation yet harbor an aversion to risk.

Obviously, innovation and guaranteed safety don’t go together. By definition, trying something new in business is always a risk.

But then, so is standing still in a fast-evolving market.

Innovation, then, is necessary even though it can be scary or exciting — and it’s frequently both.

Here are the three critical questions that we must answer in order to promote more and better innovation. How can we make it easier to discover radical and disruptive ideas? How can the downside of innovation be mitigated, including R&D costs? How can we find ways to reduce the risk and uncertainty of innovation?

My answer to all three questions is: educate before you innovate.

By that I mean educate yourself and your team. Go to school on the risks, problems, opportunities and possibilities in your market. Study your customers, your competitors, the latest technologies and market trends. Ask questions. Lots of questions.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to achieve this kind of “innovation education.” Here are five proven methods to get smarter in ways that drive more innovation with less risk:

1) Talk to your team.

Education for innovation starts with asking your own team for ideas and options. You may be the leader of the company or the department, but you don’t have to come up with all the good ideas yourself.

Encourage discussion, even debate, among members of our team. It can be a very healthy thing when people offer conflicting views and ideas. Disagreements are often clarifying. They frequently lead to new insights and can even be inspirational. Conformity and consensus, on the other hand, can be a sign that your company is in a rut.

2) Connect with customers.

Next, education for innovation means connecting with your customers. Ask them questions, too. Ask what problems they are having. Ask how you can help. Ask if they’ll fill out a 20-question survey for a $5 discount coupon or some other benefit. Ask what you can do to get them more excited about your business.

This isn’t just about surveys and focus groups. When you ask questions of your customers, don’t always confine the process to a formal channel where you are identified as the voice of the company, whether in a digital survey or a structured, face-to-face interview.

Instead, enroll yourself in the classic school of “management by walking around.” That’s when CEOs or managers simply show up in the workplace or at the point of sale, don’t introduce themselves, and ask customers (and employees) how it’s going. The answers can be tremendously educational and can point up problems — i.e., areas that are ripe for innovation.

3) Study the data.

In GE’s latest Global Innovation survey, 65% of U.S. executives (and 61% of executives worldwide, on average) said they have realized that it’s important to use Big Data and advanced analytics “to improve strategic knowledge and decision-making.”

Big Data and advanced analytics can be critical tools for smart innovation, enabling companies to spot subtle trends and otherwise-invisible discrepancies, anomalies and opportunities that often provide the groundwork for a breakthrough product or service.

4) Try a thought experiment or two. Or maybe 10 or 20.

Education for innovation can include learning from “thought experiments” where you try to figure out every detail of how your idea will work in the real world.

This is an approach we frequently take in my own innovation lab, Walker Innovation. It has enabled us to come up with thousands of innovative business solutions and to launch some very successful companies.

We like to bring together a diverse team of marketers, technology experts, executives, attorneys and sometimes even artists in a single room. Together, we thrash out the nature of the problem that we’re trying to solve and we explore ideas for new solutions we can develop.

These discussions often run for 2–6 hours a day and can extend for days or weeks at a time. Concurrently, we write out possible business plans, preliminary product descriptions, and experimental marketing stories — in fact, we put the entire gamut of the innovation on paper. Our next step may involve a computer simulator or a video.

The more different ways you think about your proposed innovation, the more angles of vision you acquire and the more tools you have to share with your own team and valued outside sources to stimulate feedback, new questions and new ideas.

This technique can eat up a lot of staff hours and that can be expensive. But it’s much, much cheaper to correct your mistakes on paper, in advance, than to launch a full-scale business and then find out what’s wrong with it after the fact.

5) Run a real-world pilot.

Education for innovation can also include trying a small-scale “pilot program” or baby-step version of your idea. Then if it works, you can expand on it.

While these five tools are critical to getting your “innovation education,” the most important ingredient may be simply to understand what innovation is — and what it isn’t.

What innovation is…

Innovation is original thinking that leads to new and valuable improvements on existing products and services, or leads to entirely new products and services that can generate brand-new markets.

But it all starts with original thinking. Self-education for innovation means looking at problems in a new way, such as declaring that a supposedly “unsolvable” situation actually can be addressed and perhaps even solved. Or realizing that an unserved group of non-customers that everyone else has written off could, with the right product or service, suddenly become very valuable customers.

What innovation isn’t…

Innovation does not have to mean billion-dollar R&D budgets or the latest, cutting-edge technology.

Innovation can simply mean doing something that’s new for your company, new for your local market or new for your industry.

No one will ever take all the risk and uncertainty out of innovation. (And if you’ve got the entrepreneurial bug, you wouldn’t want them to.) But there’s a huge difference between taking an educated risk and taking a foolish chance. We live in a risk-reward economy but the market rewards smart innovation.

That’s why “education for innovation” is a critical discipline and, for companies that want to be continuously innovative, it’s a never-ending process.