Ideas are the first seeds of innovation. Implementing a forum for identifying innovative ideas across and outside a company is a great capacity-building practice. However, without a process to identify, validate and commercialize the winning ideas, this effort will not produce results and the post-ideastorm enthusiasm will wane, leading to even greater disappointment in the long run.

Remembering Henry’s Ford’s line, “if we asked the customer, they would have asked for a faster horse.”  Most customers are limited on being able to see a much different reality than the one they exist in now. Finding heaviliy involved customers & prosumers and a wider range of experts and stakeholders builds a much better 360* view of potential futures. Customers as a stimulus & jumping off point, a jury & validation point and for context-specific engagement insights and experience journey  – we say yes. Outsourcing and delegating the art & science of innovation genius and corporate innovation incubation to customers – please no, no, no.

it’s important to look at the world as a bigger place than just the bubble that we live in. It’s so easy to get caught up in things of a trivial nature.. More than half of executives believe the next big disruption and innovation leap will come from outside their current industry, so shouldn’t we look there too?  We need a disciplined process to look cross-industry and learn what we need to about important NEW fields that might be adjacent to our own or altogether outside our current realm of mastery.

The popularity of the lean startup method is well deserved., However, iI shouldn’t be about who is the best pitcher of a new idea or business canvas..  American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent are great TV shows, but not great ways to incubate innovation. The goal should be to reward truly innovative and validated innovation ideas, not a team’s public speaking skills.. Innovation ideation should also be about strategic intent, mutual engagement, shared discovery and actual production not selling, scripting and noise.

Hackathons are great short-term ventures but suffer from a decided lack of “why”.  Before you get the unbridled spirit of  motivated coders  and experimenters involved, in your enterprise, do the tough work of asking five key questions : “why do we  want to hack?”, “what do we want (and not want) out of it?”, “where does the customer get involved (vs. producing something cool)?”, “who will inherit the hacked solution?” and “how will we sell it to others?”.

Open forums of innovation, collaboration, collective intelligence and crowdsourcing are important levers to get outside-in innovation triggers, but they are designed to be misdirected without a strategic purpose as a framework or without a north star as a criteria and guide. If you don’t know where you’re going, we don’t care how many people get involved, you don’t want them getting there very fast. Most of the results of these efforts also have a tough time being sustained and incubated inside large companies, without ownership & venture development. 

Garbage in, garbage out. The same thinking that got you into the current innovation bind you are in, will likely be the same thinking that will send you off errantly as a point of new innovation departure. SWOT analysis is a widely-used, industrial age-era management tool that looks at current perceptions of company strengths, weakenesses, opportunities & threats that unfortunately carries bias in its anecdoatal, non data-based nature, lacks an urgency & prioritization component, underestimates future context and does not lead to an obvious action p;lan.  

In the absence of time, money and competitive constraints, well funded design thinking efforts may be laudatory. However in the crushing reality of the marketplace, these efforts take way too long, are too expensive and have suspect results as they aim for the big home run, vs. hitting a lot of smart singles, doubles and triples. Plus, they have a spotty record when they come to commercializing and launching the fruits of their efforts.

In established technology & digitalizing firms, “agile” plays a key role in iterating product design and development. However, in most companies, implementing agile at scale is challenging without a lot of advance organizational spadework and training. It also frequently aims for small incremental improvements by satellite teams vs. big ambitious growth ventures, radical new structures & networks and new business models that need to align & cascade organization-wide.