APPROACH TOWARDS INNOVATION THINKING
An approach to innovation necessarily goes through four stages and each stage requires wearing a very different hat.
A. The Exploration / Wanderer stage
– Starts with an insight seeking outlook
– Explores connects in and around the objective
– Finds ideas you already have
– Reframes ideas in different ways
– Looks for fun things
B. The Crafting / Artist stage
– The idea is to question every assumption and reframe every problem
– Break rules
– Think from someone else’s perspective (People, categories, competition)
– Change, eliminate, add – fool around
– Get someone unrelated to ask silly questions
C. The Evaluation/ Judge stage
– Ask if it really is an ‘Aha! idea’
– Distil thoughts
– Question what is right about this, what is wrong
– Question your assumptions
– Look for bias at play
D. The Execution / Warrior stage
– Move from ‘what if’ to ‘what now’
– Get things done
– Put a plan in place
Each of these four stages is distinct and requires a very different approach.
Each follows the other, they are SEQUENTIAL in nature.
An idea from the Behavioural Science play book
In Behavioural Sciences, we often try and look at the problem in two ways :
1. The objective physical problem
2. The subjective mental problem
In this way we open ourselves to various solutions that one otherwise may never explore.
Eg. A lift taking long is a objective physical problem that the team can work on
However, the subjective mental problem is – waiting, uncertainty, crowd gathering etc.
How could we solve for those problems
– How do we lower uncertainty
– How do we add fun to the waiting time
– How do we reduce the crowd by helping some take stairs
This way of thinking opens up various other dimensions.
Similarly, UBER solved the problem of ‘waiting time’ by showing a car on the map and the time it would take to reach you.
When people can see the car on the app, they mentally register it as their car being enroute.