Systematic Innovation

Most innovators start their innovation journey with an insightful idea – it could be a customer insight, technology insight, market trends insight etc. However, an insightful idea by itself is not innovation, it is only the beginning of the journey. When we study the life and work of Thomas Edison (GE), Clessie Cummins (Cummins) or Steve Jobs (Apple), we see that they systematically evolved their ideas to create value for their customers and systematically overcame the constraints in the ecosystem to make their ideas work

The innovator focuses his efforts to create value (to his customer) out of his idea – he understands the pains / constraints of his customer and effectively removes them, thereby creating value. The innovator has to cross many barriers to take his offering safely to the market and deliver the value to his customer. The idea can get killed if it is not aligned to an unmet need in the market. Further the idea should be scalable to meet the demand. The innovator has to protect the idea (IP) and create an entry barrier for competition. Finally the idea should empower the customer – that’s when it will get easy acceptance. Systematic innovation frameworks like TRIZ provides innovators with tools and techniques to proactively prepare and overcome the barriers in creating value to customers and in the path to market.

The purpose of Systematic innovation is to provide a structured approach to the innovator to grow his ideas into innovation. Systematic innovation is no rocket science – let me share my experience here - I designed a systematic innovation frame-work “Innovation FLOW “ and I have been refining it over the last seven years. FLOW is an acronym for Focus, Leap & Orient, What’s next where the innovator travels through three distinct phase of ideation – focusing on the opportunity space and analyzing the problem, leaping away from current ideas and creating space for new ideas, orienting the new ideas to make them work under real life constraints, predicting what is next based on technology and market trends to define the next-generation problem. I have been applying the FLOW process to create innovative solutions in various industries – chemicals, automotive, electronics, energy, infrastructure etc. I used FLOW to create patentable inventions and develop innovative new products for both global markets and emerging markets. Based on this experience, I can very confidently say that a systematic approach to innovation significantly improves the conversion of ideas into innovations.