Innovative Thinking- The Process and Tools

To reap the benefits of innovative thinking and apply it to a business problem, start by asking four strategic questions, What is, what if, what wows, and what works? Essentially, these are translated as:

1. Assess the marketplace, get close to consumers to understand their behavior, talk to users;
2. Brainstorm and write down hypotheses; dream up your optimal, best-case-ever outcomes to a challenge; set aside constraints and fears to loosen up creativity;
3. Cull options down to a manageable number that will “wow” the customer, combining upside value while presenting profit potential;
4. Go into the marketplace with options and test the solution, product, or service with consumers, invite customers to co-create, and integrate feedback.

I've developed a number of tools to flesh out the answers to these four key process questions. Try using these four tools as part of your innovation process:

Visualization: Use sketches, photographs, and other images to visualize a problem. Other techniques are storyboards that lay out a sequence of events with simple pictures, and creating fictional persona's that visualize and represent typical customers.

Customer journey mapping: A customer journey map means you “staple yourself to a customer” to empathize with a customer’s experience from beginning to end with your brand. A book publisher could map a reader’s journey, beginning with reading about a book online and in a review, through further research, deciding whether to purchase a print or ebook, where to purchase it, the reading experience, and what happened when they finished the book (email the author, post Amazon review).

Assumption testing: Isolate and test key assumptions that will determine success or failure using thought experiments and simulations as you prepare to launch your solution or product. What assumptions are you making about your customers that need to be examined? Assumptions about operational capacity of your firm? Assumptions about how your competitors will react?

Customer co-creation: Engage the customer in the development of new business offerings. By putting prototypes in front of customers, you observe how they react, and integrate their responses to improve and change your offering. Often we get anxious about showing customers unfinished, unpolished stuff. Get over it. Innovation is about learning, and customers have the most to teach you.

Other tools include value chain analysis, mind mapping, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and the learning launch.

Have you used visualization and other forms of innovative thinking to solve problems at work? What works for you and what doesn't?