Most new ideas don’t lead to new successful products or services. Six out of seven new concepts never reach the market. Lack of support at top management is an important explanation. In my professional practice I made - and saw a lot of mistakes being made in the way innovators present their ideas.
What a brilliant idea! That’s what a lot of people think after a new idea pops into their minds. Or it’s something someone says at the end of a wonderful ideation workshop where a team of colleagues has just brainstormed new concepts. Of course, at that very moment it looks and feels like utter brilliance. Just like adoring parents swooning over their child. But, in this instance is it really justified?
Every one of us knows reasons why creativity and innovation are stopped in our organizations. It happens everyday, everywhere in the world. And every time a good idea is stopped, it’s one too many. That’s why I present in chapter five of my new book ‘The Innovation Expedition’, which you can download at the top of this article, a great list of 28 idea killers.
Innovation is difficult because your potential users need to change their behavior. And why should they? That’s the question! You will have to give them a strong reason why! So start solving a relevant problem.
Often there’s suddenly an urgent need for something new. We need to innovate. But what are we looking for? If that’s unclear, how can you come up with new concepts that will make everybody happy?
The life cycle of products decreased by factor 4 the last fifty years. Innovation is essential. But it is difficult, risky and it demands a lot of resources. It’s no walk in the park. Innovation is an expedition.
The effectiveness of brainstorms is challenged. A lot of them are done in the wrong way. In this post, Gijs van Wulfen suggests you should shut up in a brainstorm for better results.
You can invent on your own, but in an organization you can never innovate alone! You need an awful lot of colleagues and bosses to share your vision before a big change can truly take place.
Innovation is essential. But it is difficult and risky. Inspired by great explorers like Columbus, Magellan, Amundsen, Hillary and Armstrong a method for ideating new concepts was developed, designed as an expedition.
Which brainstorming techniques should you use to attack your next innovation challenge? Here are the "super seven" that innovation consultant Bryan Mattimore says have the advantages of being easy to learn, flexible to adapt to different types of creative challenges and are diverse enough to deliver different types of ideas.
Do you ever find that distractions get in the way of your creative thinking time? Is your mind buzzing, heading off in many different directions, sapping your energy for brainstorming? Tom Wujec, author of Five Star Mind: Games & Puzzles to Stimulate Your Creativity & Imagination, offers a clever solution to this common problem.
When starting innovation, a lot of the same mistakes are made over and over again. Here is how you can recognize and avoid them.
Often times coming up with new ideas is not the hard part. In this example, a team came up with 752 new business ideas in a single workshop. But how can you pick the ‘right’ ideas? Gijs van Wulfen shares five lessons that he has learned in his innovation practice.
Innovation is a product of human activity. Innovation keeps life interesting, yet it begins first, with ideation: the creation of a new thought or idea. In the following article, innovation practitioner Robert Brands shares a few idea management tips to help companies get back to the business of ideation.
Word lists, because of their simplicity, are often overlooked as a tool for brainstorming. That's too bad, because they can be quite powerful and are very easy to use. They leverage the mind's awesome associative powers to help us uncover new connections, insights and ideas.
