Killer Innovations

The Innovation Challenge

Everyone wants to be more creative… more innovative. We all look at new products and services that become wildly successful and “wish” we had come up with it … or worse came up with it first but did nothing about it. Whether our motivation is to become rich or famous (or both), creativity and innovation is the path.

The creation of ideas is so steeped in the myth of accidental discovery that many conclude it’s like playing the lottery. Why do some people seem more innovative than others? What’s their secret? Why don’t I have the ‘gift’? For decades, many have attempted to apply what they view as the standard set of creativity/brainstorming tools and methods with little or no success thus reinforcing the myth.

Our own personal experience around creativity may have been tempered by the typical “brainstorming” session that led to nowhere. We all know the exercise: get 10 to 20 of co-workers or friends together, challenge them to come up with “a new product idea” and then see what happens. Someone in the group volunteers to take notes. After about 45 minutes, the idea flow tends to slow down and eventually comes to a crawl. The scribe offers to pull together the ideas and distribute them. What happens next?? Nothing. The impact on our own self evaluation to the process is that we aren’t creative. Others were given the creativity gift and “aren’t they lucky”.

It’s not about us or our self criticism of our creativity skill; it’s about the process and skills being applied.

So what is wrong with the brainstorming approach that is the main tool used by individuals and companies today??

No upfront effort to focus the process to a specific area. Without applying some focus to the effort, ideas will be random. Should the session focus on new products or in improving existing offering? Should we look at new geographies and what new ideas could we come up with that will address its needs?
Poor structure to the question. When you ask a question like “create a new product idea”, it becomes human nature to stop looking when they feel they’ve answered the question, thus the stalling of ideas after 30 to 45 minutes. What if you had a set of proven questions that would enable you to come up with more ideas of a much higher quality? For example, rather than asking the question “come up with a new product idea”, why not ask “which of my customer’s hassles could I bypass/reduce?” This question would force you to first list the hassles, then come up with ideas to bypass/reduce.
Lack of structure to the session. As with most idea generation sessions, there is an objective “come up with a new product idea” but little or no structure to the session itself. What if you had a proven structure that ensures higher quality ideas and the assurance that you haven’t left possible areas of ideas un-searched.
No tools or skills to rank the ideas. The list that the scribe typically distributes is unstructured and unranked resulting in the teams inability to take action against the list of ideas. What is needed is a question based tool that enables the team to confidently rank the ideas so that next steps are actionable against a much smaller list of possible ideas.
No commitment from management to take action. Typically, management tasks a group to come up with some ideas (usually when a crisis is looming) but with no commitment to do anything. The result is the training of the participants that the activity is not important. Once management is convinced that there is a process that will result in higher quality ideas that are ranked, then management should make the commitment to execute a number of the top ranked ideas generated.
No process to move beyond the idea phase. There is uncertainty about what to do next once you’ve established a ranking ideas. What are the proven approaches to go from idea to commercial launch??

The above issues are not limited to just brainstorming sessions. The same deficiencies exist in other idea generation/execution tools such as:

Da Vinci Method
Mindmapping
SCAMPER
Lateral Thinking
Merlin Approach (sometimes called the Einstein Method)
many others . . . .

Many authors and gurus have stepped forward attempting to describe the intricacies of creativity adding to the complexity and fear that it is a gift that is bestowed to a few leaving the rest of us in the dark.

Why is this different?

The purpose of this blog and podcast is to emove the mystery about creativity and reveal that the creation of ideas is not a ‘trick’ or ‘gift’ but instead a ‘skill’. A skill that can be learned, a skill that can be practiced and a skill that can be mastered by anyone with any education level.

Phil McKinney has spent his entire career searching for an approach to consistently create killer innovations. The award winning products that Phil has created over his entire career were based on a “idea”. What he struggled to explain was what enabled himself to keep coming up with killer ideas. What he discovered, through a personal exercise to reverse engineer/hack the process, that “the quality of the ideas is directly related to the quality of the question being asked”. The result was that he created an elegant and simple approach to enable anyone to unlock their human potential to create killer ideas.

This ‘question based’ approach to innovation developed by Phil has been tested and adopted by leading companies, non-profits, governments, schools/universities, and NGO’s around the world.

All could benefit greatly by:

Bringing focus to the session. Where should we focus our search for innovation?
Put structure to the idea generation session (no matter the tool). How do I structure the idea generation session to ensure a highly successful outcome?
Ask a better question that results in better ideas. What questions would lead to the best ideas?
Ranking of the ideas to focus resources. Of the ideas generated, which would have the highest likelihood of success?
Use a proven approach to execute against the best ideas. What approach should be used to translate the idea into innovation?

What would be the impact if there existed a proven approach that addressed all of these deficiencies? What if there was a book that made this approach so simple, anyone with any skill or education level could apply and be successful?

What is the Killer Innovations Methodology?

The purpose of this methodology to enable you to create killer innovations? A killer innovation is a significant and highly profitable departure from current offerings or practices that would be difficult to duplicate.

Significant: Must be easily recognized as being a unique idea/approach that is not just an extension to what already exists today.
Highly Profitable: There are many ideas, but few that can create entirely new industries/markets with a profit stream that creates growth, jobs economies and wealth.
Difficult to Duplicate: To create competitive advantage, the innovation must be unique, either with intellectual property or leveraging unique capabilities of the organization, such that others cannot duplicate.

The methodology is built around a four step process of: Focus, Ideation, Ranking and Execution (FIRE).

FOCUS

By focusing the area of innovation, you set the stage for successfully identifying killer innovations. The methodology addresses:

What types of innovation are possible?

What areas of innovation are available to my problem?

How do we select the areas and types that will return the most value?

Before embarking on a search for the next killer innovation, you must first consider the types of innovation possible – incremental innovation and killer innovation and the areas of innovation available to them — new market, new geographies, industry structure, value chain, products or services, customer segment. It’s not always easy to determine which area of focus will lead to the killer innovation. In some cases, it may be best to consider all options before selecting the one to execute. Which area will generate the most value?

IDEATION

Ideation is all about the process of applying killer questions to a specific area of innovation. The methodology shares how to apply the approach to real problems.

Before beginning the process of ideation, we must consider such items as; makeup and diversity of the team being asked to participate, homework. structure and format of a session that will result in the best ideas, exercises to use to warm up the participants, ground rules during a session, roles and responsibilities during a session and the deliverables that each team must create.

The methodology looks at:

Why aren’t customers or focus groups not a good source of ideas?

How should you select the right team members to ensure the right chemistry?

What homework should the team do before a session?

What are the lessons learned from real sessions that I can leverage?

What structure works best for a session?

How do I create an environment that results in the best ideas?

RANKING

Ranking describes the steps, questions and criteria to apply to the list of ideas that will enable the reader to developed a rank list based on; market impact, ability to establish critical mass, uniqueness, organization structure to execute, culture leverage and management support. Based on the proven criteria, it will ensure that the resulting killer ideas have alignment and value before resources are expended.

The methodology addresses:

How should the criteria be applied to each idea?

How should the votes against the criteria be collected to ensure un-biased group intelligence?

What are the rules-of-thumb about the minimum criteria before moving forward?

EXECUTION

Ideas without execution are a hobby. Execution introduces what many of the leading innovators have learned from hard earned experience, that going from idea to innovation is hard work and where most projects fail is in the proper management of the process. Many program either over invest because of the belief that once the program got started, you need to see it through – or under invest because of risk concerns of management about spending on the unknown.

A research study a number of years ago found that when you look at the top innovators across a wide range of industries, the common criteria for success was the use of a gate milestone process on top of well defined phases. Why? Proper phasing ensures that the end result will align with success. The application of a gate milestone process establishes proper milestone criteria (proof that the idea is on track to become a killer innovation, defined go/no go to ensure fast failure) and funding gates (funding commiserate with success).

The methodology addresses:

What should be the phases of a successful innovation process?

Why is the gate milestone a key success component?

How should the gates/milestones be defined?

What criteria should used to define each gate?