Innovation Series — Post 2: Big Ideas & Corporate Memory

A series of posts I am publishing focused on innovation in a real business environment — not theory, not ideal world scenarios, but what innovation really is, how to foster it within a business, pitfalls to avoid, and how ultimately it can deliver value to a business, its customers and clients.

If you missed it, post 1 is available here

“We just need one big idea”

When looking for innovation, I have seen a lot of companies and teams on the hunt for that one big idea. The answer often seems to be to open a portal for your staff and customers to submit ideas and you will find the one idea to change the world.

I agree that a good idea can come from anyone, but my experience has always been that you receive the same obvious suggestions over and over again; ideas that:

• have been tried before and proven ineffective
• sound simple but are actually so complex to deliver they lose the company money
• would actually be illegal

What I have found to be more successful is looking to people close enough to a subject to give sensible suggestions, but use techniques to get them thinking in a different way. Design Thinking has some good methods to help generate ideas. Another method I’ve had success with is to get your team to talk about a completely different, but parallel business.

EXAMPLE: If you are an online retailer, talk about what you would do if you were an online retailer in a different sector, or if you are an airline think about what a national bus company would do.

This approach puts you in a parallel business where you don’t know about the problems they have, the team that blocks things, or the system that can’t be updated. You can then focus on the improvements and generate ideas that can be played back to your business.

There is not normally one big idea, just a series of ideas the collectively help shape your product and drive innovation. In my opinion, the more ideas the better.

Corporate Memory

Another way to look for ideas is to focus on what you are trying to achieve rather than how your company or even industry works today. In tourism we have products and processes that can be traced back decades, still influencing how things happened today (unless you are a brand-new startup, this is probably true for your industry as well).

Think about a business need from 30 years ago — the people finding the solution would utilise very different technology and customer expectations to today, but the influence of those solutions became part of the corporate or industry memory, and in many cases a basis of how things are done today.

My favourite story to illustrate this relates to the check-in process for airlines. I like to ask an audience why traditional airlines ask you to check-in 24 hours in advance. The answer is because that is what the trans-oceanic ships that provided transport before aircraft did. The next question is why the steam powered ships did this, and the answer is because sailing ships did. The sailing ships were very dependent on winds and tides to leave harbour, so it was important people were near the ship the day before so that Captain could board them and leave at the right time.

Tides and (normally) wind have no effect on modern airliners, but the check-in process is still very much with us and is now an integral part of so many other processes. As an innovator, often your role is to go back to the original needs and answer the question again using modern technology and capabilities, and not just build on what has gone before.

Learning for the Future

Previously, I talked about the importance of focusing on what the product does rather than the technology that it uses as people don’t really care about technology. What is important is the fact that new technologies will appear that you must understand before you can start building useful products and services for your customer and colleagues.

Wearables to me are a great example. We will move away from the age of the mobile phone over the next decade and into a world of more personal, wearable technology. Starting with just a blank piece of paper it is difficult to imagine what this shift will mean for the business and our customers, so getting hands on is important. Knowing what the technology can deliver, how interactions happen, and where your customers are likely to go, are all key learnings that can help you decide to invest now, invest later, watch closely, or ignore.

To summarise this post, as an innovator you should learn from the past, innovate for the future, and focus on building ideas not hoping you discover them.

If you like what we are doing with technology and travel in TUI and want to help us on our digital journey the come and join our team. The roles we have open are here on our careers site

#innovation #designthinking #traveltech #techjobs #technology #wearables