Innovative Thinking System

It's time to innovate.

Whether you want to innovate the business model, the products, the processes, the sales and marketing - this is the time to innovate.

Let's look at the game of innovation.

First thing to understand is INNOVATION is not equal to CREATIVITY.

INNOVATION = CREATIVITY + IMPLEMENTATION

Innovative Thinking System - ITS - Overall Flow

There are 4 key phases of any good innovative thinking system.

1st Phase is Generating New Ideas

Most people think that Innovation means creating new ideas.

NO.

Creating new ideas is only the 1st step.

How do you create new ideas?

Some people have a mental block from their childhood that they are not CREATIVE.

It is not true.

We have not learn't and practiced CREATIVITY and anything that we haven't learn't and practiced, we are not good at it.

So creativity is a matter of learning and practicing.

What one can use here are the various Divergent Thinking Methods. Divergent thinking helps individuals and teams to go beyond the mental blocks and create an abundance of ideas.

Some of the famous divergent thinking methods are:

Technique B - Breaking down Common Notions

Technique D - Dreaming or Future Visualizing

Technique F - Finding Flaws with current systems to trigger new ideas

Technique O - Overstating and Understating some facts by a huge factor - triggering some new thoughts and ideas

Technique R - Reversing the current way of doing things - again a thought experiment to trigger new ideas

Technique L - Linking two or more unconnected ideas to trigger a new thought process

Technique A - It is a game of adding new options/dimensions or facets to the existing products or services that make a difference.

The next step after generating lots of ideas is to scientifically shortlisting those ideas.

2nd Phase - Scientifically Shortlist ideas with Screening Techniques

Since one cannot experiment or prototype all ideas, we have to shortlist the ideas from the vast list that got created through the divergent thinking process.

This process is called the CONVERGENT THINKING PROCESS.

The famous Screening Techniques are:

1. Bird's View and Bug's View : Seeing Macro and then going micro. Looking at all the ideas and putting them in some categories and then selecting the best ideas in each category.
2. Decision Screening: Deciding the parameters of evaluating the ideas and then screening the ideas based on the parameters.
3. Priority Screening: After having some ideas shortlisted, further shortlisting can happen based on the impact priorities. One can also give weightages to the various impact and then evaluate the ideas against those impact parameters.

Next step in the journey is to polish and and develop the shortlisted ideas.

3rd Phase: Polishing and Developing the Shortlisted Ideas

Some of the powerful methods for polishing and developing your ideas into extraordinary proposals are:

Polishing-E [Emotion] : Polishing the emotional connect of the idea with the stakeholders

Polishing-B [Benefit]: Polishing the benefits that the customer or company could derive

Polishing-D [Drawback] : Addressing and reducing the likely drawbacks

Polishing-F [Fact]: Making sure one has all the relevant facts

Polishing-S [Strength]: Adding to the Strength of the idea's main point. Reducing the negatives, increasing the positives.

Polishing-T [Testing]: Prototyping and testing the hypothesis with min. risk

Polishing-P [Pre-Plan]: Making the proposals as desired by the various stakeholders.

The next step in the journey is Implementation. And one needs to create a proper implementation plan to ensure that the idea is converted to reality and the desired benefits are accrued.

The mapping techniques to be used for creating the implementation road maps,

Happy Innovating!

Best Wishes from Manoj Onkar - [email protected]