Innovation thrives on inspiration
By James Jesty, Shape New Ideas
The leadership team’s role is to ask the right questions and to ensure the project team doesn’t leave any stone unturned in the quest for breakthrough insights and ideas. Often this requires a fresh perspective and inspiration. Bring in expertise from outside, borrow people from another team, work with creative consumers and fans of your products — all this helps create new viewpoints and perspectives.
Every team gets locked into a way of thinking about their category or sector, which leads to brands and services mirroring each other. The supermarket shelves are littered with products turning up in similar packaging and making similar claims. A lack of uniqueness and differentiation results in underperforming new products.
To overcome this, a project team should step outside of their category to seek inspiration from elsewhere.
The GB Olympic cycling team is a good example of this. They sent out ‘secret squirrels’ to hunt for ideas from science, the military and industry to make a series of marginal improvements to the team’s performance. The aggregation of a number of incremental innovations resulted in an unprecedented number of medals in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics.
So when you kick off an innovation program, always task the innovation team to go hunt for inspiration from outside of your immediate field of expertise.
