You’re passionate about innovation, but how can you keep your ideas grounded in practicality?

Two thoughts on the term innovation. Innovation is the change you bring to the market. Actually, it is about capturing the value from meaningful insights via new offerings. There are two decisive concepts in these sentences: change and value. One of the biggest problems for any innovator is innovation adoption. How does the customer define value (no, it is not the innovator, but the customer)? And what keeps the customer from changing from OLD to NEW? You have to understand these two deeply. Experiments are needed. And then let the data speak, avoiding confirmation bias.

Determine who has the problem, and what is the most urgent and immediate problem that person wants to solve. Too many times as made bad assumptions of our world and only to launch a problem that nobody will buy. Derisk the customer needs first. Do this with interviews, solution pitch, and concierge a MVP to verify if it solve the problem before building the product.

Once again, I want to emphasize not innovating just for the sake of innovation. The purpose of innovation is always to bring about better experiences or higher value for the cost, rather than simply aiming to set records or achieve novelty. When faced with multiple issues, it's essential to analyze which problem to tackle first from various perspectives, including the difficulty and impact of each problem. At the same time, when setting goals, thorough feasibility analysis should be conducted, including both technical and market aspects, while also conducting a comprehensive assessment of cost and timeline risks. Only when all these aspects are manageable can the decision to initiate this innovation work be made.

Identifying early adopters is key to a successful innovation. You might solve a complex problem but if the solution does not cater to the buyer then no matter what you do; Innovation fails. Early adopter helps you to bring all the aspects of customers as well users. These inputs define the problem statement from both i.e. user's and the customer's perspective.

The aha-moment is that very few corporate executives are aware of practical application of basic innovation concepts like how to get from idea to profitable new business thorugh business model modelling, testing pivoting, validating with customers. The above cause misundertanding of sales role in growh. It is assumed that sales force know customers best and could provide meaningful insights to R&D (mainly) on what customers wants. This is wrong! Sales force normally is focused on selling products/services which are sellable here and now (this is what they've got bonuses for). It is paramaunt to understand, that sales force per ce is not able to provide meaningful insights on future offering, because of rate of ideas failures.

Don't just ask friends! talk to your colleagues, people in a networking session. People who are strangers but potential customers. This is a great way to see if there are similarities in the pain points, and whether your proposed idea might be helpful!

Uma boa defini??o de AKIs (Aspirations and Key Insights) é fundamental para decidir entre continuar, iterar ou cancelar uma ideia.

In order to optimize outcome from an innovation project, leaders must ensure that their stakeholder group includes those with lived experience with the problem that they're trying to solve. Guessing at needs, challenges, or potential points of resistance will only prolong the project, disappoint those funding it, and lead to lower adoption.

This step should be completed simultaneously with the first step. Only after thorough feasibility research can it be determined as the primary target for breakthroughs. Such feasibility analysis requires a substantial amount of theoretical knowledge and market data to support it. The project team needs to possess professional technical judgment and market analysis capabilities. If these capabilities are not available within the company, expert review meetings can be convened or professional research firms can be hired. Feasibility analysis is crucial for a long-term, high-investment project.

The key to remember here is that in corporate environment to have 1 new successful business it is mandatory to process at least 10 ideas (presellected, based on venture capitalists practices). SO intrapreneurship in corporate world is exactly how to build a system which allows ideate, test, incubate or stop multiple ideas in order to get the one. Then "validate your assumptions" means for multiple ideas at once and further.

Try to reach out to future potential customers with your prototype. The most common mistake for an innovator is to limit feedback to a small group of colleagues or friends and family. This can lead to a misunderstanding of the true value of the innovation because these people tend to provide only positive feedback, and their demands or behaviour may differ from your intended audience.

After feasibility analysis, for a large-scale innovation project such as a dark ride project, creating a mockup is the best choice to save costs, time, and mitigate risks. Building and testing a mockup system for the most critical technical challenges of the project, analyzing the results comprehensively, and conducting reliability tests are crucial steps. Only when the tests meet the predetermined requirements and demonstrate high reliability can significant investments in manpower, resources, and finances be initiated. Moreover, such testing can be conducted at different stages, similar to Fragile management methods in the project management field, ensuring efficient implementation and manageable risks throughout the innovation project.

Develop a plan: Once you have done your research and received feedback, it is important to develop a well-thought-out plan for implementing your idea. This should include a timeline, budget, and a contingency plan for any potential obstacles.

Nearly all innovative endeavors involve interdisciplinary collaboration, and due to the unpredictable nature of innovation, mutual trust and cooperation among various departments and disciplines are crucial. Within our team, I've always advocated for a concept of "half-step across" collaboration, which means managing both your input and output departments with a proactive approach. It's essential to promptly address any issues you notice in their work and provide feedback without hesitation. Additionally, you should actively seek their feedback to ensure seamless and flawless collaboration at every step of the process.

Any innovative work doesn't happen overnight; rather, that's where the joy of innovation lies. You have endless new ideas and concepts to implement incrementally. In the realm of theme entertainment, project iteration also signifies customer revisitation. Therefore, we should treat any innovation work like a "child" – nurturing it continuously after its birth, imparting new knowledge, and equipping it with cutting-edge technology. Throughout this process, it's crucial to conduct customer satisfaction surveys, humbly take onboard customer improvement suggestions, and allow "our child" to continuously refine and evolve.

Si buscamos responder rápidamente y flexiblemente a los cambios del entorno a través de la innovación, es clave tener claro el proceso para gestionar el aprendizaje del equipo y que este aprendizaje nos ayude a adaptarnos de la manera más efectiva posible para tomar mejores decisiones. Cuando hablamos de innovación es muy importante crear un entorno seguro para experimentar y tomar riesgos, en dónde el fracaso sea parte del proceso de aprender, que permita mejorar continuamente en el proceso de innovar, en dónde el valor no solo sea el éxito, sino en el aprendizaje permanente que te lleve al éxito de manera consistente y permanentemente en el tiempo y que sea parte de la cultura de innovación de la organización.

Critical adaptation (in addtion to personal progress) is to adapt organization. Organization must become ambidexterous is order to provide space for innovations. This means that innovation process must be paralled with current business streams with no intersection. There should be only high level aligning on top management level in serach for synergy effect.

Consider, that corporate understanding of innovation is very vague, with huge bias towards technological innovation. Business model innovation, and, therefore, customer discovery and knowledge are purely understood (despite heavily promoted in communications). It is mandatory to work on it in parallel with value innovation process itself.