3 Ways Innovation Thinking can Improve your Business
How can learning about innovation help you be a better innovator?
In today’s business world, I sometimes find myself wishing I was born 200 years earlier so I could beat Thomas Edison to come up with the idea of the lightbulb, or 100 years earlier to come up with the idea of the computer, or even 30 years earlier so I could beat Tim Berners-Lee to the invention of the world wide web (Andrews, 2019). How did those old guys come up with such brilliant ideas?
It does not have to be revolutionary to be innovative.
If everything important has already been discovered, what is left for us to discover? This brings me to the first lesson I learned in ENTI 674: Technologies of Innovation with krishans; it does not have to be revolutionary to be innovative, although that certainly helps. Innovation thinking is about making improvements, and design thinking will tell you that the improvements can be iterative. Design thinking is all about empathizing with the user to understand the problem, defining what the problem is, ideating a solution, prototyping the solution, and then testing it to see if it alleviates the problem (Dam and Siang, 2020).
In the course, I felt the most engaged when I finally understood that concept and I tied it to a quote by one of my role models:
This a tough Game of Pennies — requiring thousands of good ideas to improve part cost, a factory process or simply the design, while increasing quality and capabilities. A great idea would be one that saves $5, but the vast majority are 50 cents here or 20 cents there.
Elon Musk
(Loveday, 2020)
I began to live Design Thinking when working on our final group project that involved designing a technological innovation to help a non-profit make better use of its resources. Small improvements in processes here and there come together to make a more efficient whole.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The part about this course that surprised me the most was how to turn seemingly mundane technologies into a well-functioning and useful product. You might be familiar with Google Sheets as a free, web alternative to Microsoft Excel. Did you know, however, that Google Sheets can be used to easily collect information from forms and send emails to people? Or did you know that you could create an automated tool that searches social media for job postings and sends them to you? Did you know that you could create a bot to send automated messages from your social media accounts?
In our final group project, my group had the opportunity to combine many of the technologies that we learned about in class to produce a seamlessly integrated, automated user experience using Zapier to connect the tools I mentioned above. Things that used to take a lot of code to integrate are easily accessible by the average person; a great example of the democratization of technology. This is important because this expands what once were ubiquitous parts of our everyday life into new and efficient tools to connect to your customers and grow your business. The best part about all of this is that most of these tools are free or low-cost so almost anyone can access them.
Good design is human-centered design.
The most important part of design thinking is empathizing with the user. Without this step, you would not have a clear understanding of the pain point that you need to address. A good design should take into account what the problem is and what the solution needs to be, but also the user experience when interacting with the solution. Paper prototyping is a good example of a way to improve the user experience, however, I think I can make it plainer than that. The answer to good design is human-centered design, and a good human-centered design is a simple design.
A simple solution should achieve exactly what a more complex solution would, but without the bulk and extra work that comes along with it. This is why in the Pelham-Park Pizzeria Case I advocated for simple solutions all along the way. I grew up teaching my parents and grandparents how to use technology, and so I would like to think I am an expert in simplifying things. It would be great to have all the Instachats, and Snapgrams, but I think starting off with just an Instagram account is more than enough. Installing a fantastic power-over-ethernet, hardwired security camera system to keep an eye on the restaurant would be amazing but it is much more complex and costly than just a simple wireless camera. Sure establishing your own in-house delivery service and building your own drive-thru would be great, but how will you manage the delivery orders and drivers, and who will take care of the drive-thru ordering system?
Oftentimes when you reduce complexity, you also reduce inefficiencies associated with the prior design. Although in certain instances such as production lines, more stations can increase efficiency, reducing complexities can help reduce the financial and emotional burden on yourself and your employees.
I think this is the one thing that I will carry forward throughout my career and into the future especially when trying to bootstrap a business; saving time and money is of high importance.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
To conclude, I think it is apt to circle back to the old guys and their brilliant ideas. Thomas Edison reportedly failed 1,000 to 10,000 times before successfully coming up with the lightbulb. People today come up with amazing ideas all the time; some of the most well-known tech entrepreneurs nowadays are serial entrepreneurs. It might not have been apparent from my description above, but the whole design thinking process is cyclical and not linear. Failure just means going back and thinking of a new way to do it. A successful idea means that there is a better way to do it just around the corner. I think above all, the most important thing I learned in this course is that great ideas come from good ideas, and good ideas come from having a lot of ideas.
References
Andrews, E. (2019, October 28). Who Invented the Internet? History.com. Retrieved April 25 2020 from https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-the-internet#:~:text=ARPANET%20adopted%20TCP%2FIP%20on,invented%20the%20World%20Wide%20Web.
Dam, R.F., and Siang, T.Y. (2020, November 25). What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular? Interaction-Design.org. Retrieved April 25 2020 from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular
Loveday, S. (2020, December 20). Elon Musk Tells Tesla Employees Profit Is Paramount: Cost-Cutting Is Key. InsideEVs. Retrieved April 25 2020 from https://insideevs.com/news/458003/musk-focus-on-profit-reduce-cost/
