Cross-Industry Innovation

Since working at Trend Hunter, the worlds #1 trend firm and innovation accelerator, I'm helping Fortune 500 companies with research and tactical workshops to accelerate innovation and I’ve started to notice a trend of my own: Companies fail to innovate because they simply aren’t starting in the right spot.

Imagine trying to spark a fire with wet wood, wet flint stone, or even a wet pack of matches. Year-after-year you keep going back those same wet materials and that same wet spot; your odds of creating a bon fire aren’t lookin’ so hot. Now, what if you decided to travel to a spot that wasn’t wet? What if you started looking to warmer places, somewhere with an overhanging shelter, somewhere with dry materials, hay, a lighter or gasoline? Now we can get a spark!

Ok, maybe that was a poor analogy, but it’s late and I’m tired, but you see what I’m getting at? You need to look anywhere but the same wet, damp spots you’ve been looking at for years and get inspiration from other areas or industries.

The legendary businessman Henry Ford once visited a beef packing plant in Chicago many years ago. Ford took great interest in the way workers processed the beef from whole carcasses into small cuts of ready-to-sell meat. As he observed, it occurred to him that if the process was reversed, all the cuts would go back together to form a whole carcass again. He thought if he could reverse the process and apply it to automobiles he could build cars this way. Ford returned home to Detroit and promptly created the famous assembly line.

Electrical engineer George De Mestral went hunting one day in the Swiss Alps in 1941 with his dog. When he returned home, he noticed several spiny seeds - called burdock burrs - were stuck to his clothes and the dog's fur. Noticing the odd adhesive properties of the seed, he took them home and examined them under a microscope, where he noticed hundreds of hooks that caught on anything with a loop, such as fabric, fur or hair. Mestral instantly saw the possibility and after nearly a decade of experimenting, he perfected what is now called Velcro, which was patented in 1955.

For all those VP’s, Directors and Managers of Innovation, Consumer insights, Product Development or whoever might be reading this, I’m not telling you to go to a meat packing plant or the Swiss Alps hunting trip with your dog in order to innovate, but consider outside sources or vendors like Trend Hunter who can help you look at hundreds of thousands of ideas and industries with a simple phone call or click of a button!

Companies are starting to realize they have to disrupt their own company before another organization does it to them. Marc Heleven, innovation expert says,

"using inspiration and trends from different sectors to improve your own company is necessary for your company to survive.” He says, “Businesses who don’t look beyond their own sector to innovate are doomed to fail."

And so you're thinking, "but who has time for that?" Well, Trend Hunter has over 200,000 idea hunters around the world doing it for you - Finding new ideas, products and campaigns from every pocket of the globe for us to organize, track consumer engagement and then customize a trend report on any industry or area of interest. On top of that, we have Future Festival as a way to bring all the worlds top innovators under one roof to prototype their future.

So stop trying to light your fire with wet flint and look for something dry, warm or new to ignite your culture of innovation. Take an Innovation Assessment here! I'm a Hungry Daredevil, what are you?