How to Out-Innovate the Competition

The world moves fast, and if you don’t continuously and quickly evolve to keep up with it, your competition will. However, you can stay ahead if you invest the time and resources. Below are 3 simple, yet powerful steps to ensure you can out-innovate the competition.

4 Hours a Month

I know you and your team want to creatively solve problems, but you think you can’t find the time. You are too busy working toward your objectives and key results, plus putting out unplanned fires. However, innovation takes time, so it’s your responsibility as the business leader to devote time every month to innovate. It may sound counterintuitive that you must schedule time to be creative (i.e., “Doesn’t creativity occur spontaneously?”), but without unadulterated time, your team cannot unclutter their minds and think creatively. At my company (Topstep), we schedule 4 contiguous, sacred hours each month for every team member to unplug, head into our innovation laboratory, and think creatively about solving our business’s most vexing challenges.

Doesn’t creativity occur spontaneously?

100 Ideas

Besides time, innovation requires a quantity of ideas. When looking for your next great idea, you first need to generate a bunch of so-so ideas. In fact, generating 100 not-so-great ideas is the best place to start. Here’s how you get to that lofty, but important threshold. First, organize into teams of 4-6 and collectively brainstorm at least 20 ideas. Then, disperse for a few days, perhaps even weeks, to give each team member time individually to digest each idea―no matter how farfetched or absurd―and re-mold them into an additional 20 new ideas. When the team reconvenes, you’ll have a hundred or more ideas to select from. From there, we use a number of techniques to whittle down to the very best, including Kill-Keep-Combine and 10/4 voting (where every team member has 10 votes, but they cannot apply more than 4 votes to any single idea). Within your hundred ideas, there will be at least one brilliant diamond ready to be discovered.

Every single team member participates in our monthly innovation lab

100% Participation

Lastly, you need your entire organization to fully commit to the process. Sure, you’ll get excuses like “I’m just not a creative person” or “I have so much real work to finish” but it’s imperative that you remind your team that their unique perspective and individual contribution is the only way to generate winning ideas. At Topstep, every single team member participates in our monthly innovation lab.

The Results

To out-innovate the competition, you must commit time (4 hours per month) and resources (100% participation), which translates into a substantial investment. Assuming a 50-person firm’s average salary is $100,000, then 4 hours of innovation time is worth $10,000 per month. We’ve been following this process for 2 years at Topstep, and the $120,000 per year investment has already resulted in multiple winning ideas that will ultimately contribute millions to the top line. Given this success, we plan to continue to follow this process in 2020 and beyond.