The Six Most Common Approaches To Innovation. Tell Me Which One Works For Best For You?

Here's a picture of my notes which is part of my presentation next week on innovation and organizational change. I was on my way from the airport to the hotel. I was thinking about many of the challenges my clients face internally due to the lack of a burning desire to make the change. Does companies need to have near-death experiences in order for them to act?

I just came back from innovation sessions and they were very fruitful. The participants were very energized seeing into the future and its possibilities, they also have a very pragmatic view of how to make innovation happens.

Innovation is not only hard but also requires a set of new skills.  You need to see "change" as an opportunity but not a "problem."  Some people welcome bigger problems otherwise they get bored. And most innovation dialogue takes two paths 1/ a visually stimulating sense-making dialogue to create a deeper understanding of the problem space 2/unstructured, playful and open-minded dialogue about the problem face

People often ask me the question “What’s the best approach to innovation?” There is not best way. But there are many toolkits, practices and metaphor to making innovation more productive.  Innovation doesn’t have to be unproductive, spending days or brainstorming doesn’t necessarily get you’re the big ideas. There are many secret weapons to make innovation smart and productive. I’ve shared many of those here in previous posts.

So here are the 6 most common approaches to innovation:

Find-New-Ideas-To-Power-Up-Growth-Strategy approaches to innovation – An approach to innovation in which organization make the most strategic use of innovation. Linking innovation to a growth strategy is wise for organizations. Every organization should institutionalize innovation and use it drive growth and this include an integrated processes linking their innovation group with marketing and corporate strategy.  The innovation plan should be given the mandate to explore and provide as many ideas as possible to form key pillars of growth.

Find-Customer Needs-First approach to innovation – An approach to innovation in which companies relentlessly uncover customer’s unmet needs through a “Jobs-to-the-done” lens.  Then devise solutions to address those unmet needs and often unarticulated needs (things that traditional market research often fails to uncover). There are situations this approach can be less effective when dealing with very new technology or products that yet exist, as customer cannot articulate what don’t know. There are ways to get around that by showing consumers mock-ups of future products and services.

Find-A-Killer-Idea-First approach to innovation – This works well particularly in an entrepreneurial way. Sometimes people just want to look for the next big idea (VCs for example) and don’t care about the industry or scope and scale of these big ideas. The best example is the famous story that Jeff Bezos was driving across the country and came up with the ideas of Amazon.com.

Throw-Plenty-Of-Ideas-Around approach to innovation. This usually doesn’t work well due to a lack of focus and strategic intent. Often ideas are left there without any follow-up action or ideas are not attached to business. Funny enough this is the most common way companies are trying to get new ideas.

Define-The-Problem-First approach to innovation. This is another good way to start. Spend more time on framing the issues and understand the problem context before you start innovating. This way the outcome is usually very relevant to the problem and at the minimum you will get a comprehensive views of the problems even if you can’t get to the right solution.

Hide-In-The-Dark approach to innovation. This is when people want to innovate under the radar-screen for reasons such as there's a lack of support from senior executives or not ready to expose the idea until they’re ready. This is often a pretty effective way, people come up with creative ways to do skunk projects and these projects will ultimately benefit the organization. The challenge is getting the resources you need since you’re don’t have proper resource allocated to it.

It is inherently flawed approach to innovation is when you start with the creative generation of ideas and is followed by different evaluation and filtering methods that determine which ideas customers like best or best fit the business without ever explicitly understanding the two most important factors: 1/ customer unmet needs 2/ future scenarios 3/technological foresight. Stage-gate is the most popular but it is a product development process and not an innovation process. Many get confused.

Although this approach is popular, the chances of coming up with an idea that precisely addresses all the unmet needs of a target customer are near zero. This approach is kind of like a sharpshooter trying to hit a target without knowing what the target is or a doctor prescribing a treatment without seeing patient symptoms. Innovaiton is not guesswork.